Re: A few issues with thumbs.el

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> - I wish there was a way to put the thumbs directly next to the original
>> image files.  E.g. instead of ~/.emacs-thumbs/foo!bar!baz!toto!NNNN.jpg
>> I'd like to use ~/foo/bar/baz/.emacs-thumbs/toto_NNNN.jpg.
> What are the benefits of doing this?

Locality.  I find the concept of locality to be extremely important.
E.g. if I rename the directory "foo/bar/baz" to "off/bar/baz" it will just
keep working without any need to recreate thumbs.  If I delete the
directory, the thumbs will automatically be deleted with the images, ...

> I think it would litter the system with extra directories.

What are the problems with that?  It'll still be a negligible fraction of
the disk space and of the number of directories on the disk.

Other advantages: the number of files in a .emacs-thumbs dir will this way
not be larger than the number of files in any other directory, so it'll
automatically avoid suffering from the all-too-common problem where some
Unix file systems don't handle large directories efficiently (things like
O(n) lookup (and worse) behavior).

> I can see how it could solve the uniqueness-problem, not needing to add
> a hash anymore, but I don't know how big a problem that is (see discussion
> below).

I don't care much about solving the uniqueness problem.  I just think that
putting the thumbs next to their source image is The Right Thing.


        Stefan