Brilliantly retold by our pal Rupert on GimpNet, “Nautilus bugzilla is pretty much like whack-a-mole” (–interatom, April 23, 2004). As I’m feeling the need for a bit of hammer time after a short hiatus due to family troubles, and to whack as many of these moles as possible, and just as a general friendly reminder for future reference for those also writing software in the community, I would like to direct your attention to a nice piece of documentation written by someone on the GNOME Documentation Team some time ago (I would love to credit them for this, if you happen to know who it was perchance):
Installing a Thumbnailer Program in GNOME.
This document is the practical “How-to” guide for installing thumbnailers for any arbitrary format of your liking. If you find that “application/x-arbitrary-filetype” is not getting thumbnails and you would like it to, please consult said document, file a bug against the piece of software relating to “application/x-arbitrary-filetype”, ask them to provide a program or command-line argument suitable for thumbnailing said documents, and update their software packages as to install said program in the way described above. Tada, no more complaining about the lack of thumbnails on OpenOffice documents, EPS/Postscript documents (should be handled already by Evince these days), Word Documents, EXE files, and yes, even Folders if you wish.
(As an aside, does anyone know why OpenOffice doesn’t supply a thumbnailer by default? I know they have a GNOME support package, this seems like it would be one of the most obvious things for said package to contain, especially as the thumbnailer itself could be as simple as a couple of lines of already-written, but in need of a slight-update, python code to extract the thumbnail from the ODF zip. This is already a very old bug in Launchpad.)
This post closes GNOME bugs numbered #500519, #377786, #363006, #347694, and presumably bug #84927 if someone wanted to write a (silly) thumbnailer for “inode/directory”.
In other news: I will be attending UDS for the first time ever, provided I can find time to actually buy the tickets ;), to help work on the Jaunty Jackalope and the never-ending battle of Ubuntu Desktop Integration. Thank you Canonical for your considerations and generosity. It will be great to get to meet with the rest of the team and discuss the future direction of the GNOME Desktop in Ubuntu.
2005 I helped with that code… yet I have no idea why some thing like it has never made it in to ubuntu :(.
Thunar already has it as a package so surely if python was the issue the code could be nicked out of that package instead ?
Got to get the right persons attention I spose 🙁