Re: screenshots.debian.net
On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 11:49:06AM +0100, Christoph Haas <email@christoph-haas.de> was heard to say:
> On Montag, 17. November 2008, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 07:46:27PM +0100, Christoph Haas
> <email@christoph-haas.de> was heard to say:
> > > There should be a way to select what screenshot you want. I'm saving
> > > the version number along with the screenshot.
> >
> > Personally, I would rather be able to provide a version number
> > and then get the "best" screenshot you have.
>
> What is the "best"? :)
I deliberately left that vague because I wasn't sure. :-)
If there's an exact match, I would return that image; otherwise,
I don't really care. The same thing the unversioned page returns
would be fine and probably better than trying to be clever and find
a good match.
> > Then I could show a
> > matching screenshot if there was one, and *something* if there
> > wasn't.
>
> I can add a version parameter to the /thumbnail requests that would give
> you only a thumbnail for the exact version. Just keep in mind that by
> default the web interface suggest the Sid package revision. And that
> number changes pretty often. So I'd say it's not likely you will get a
> certain screenshots for your desired version. Unless of course you query
> for the Lenny version. But I assume that most people just accept that
> automatically displayed revision number even though the screenshots comes
> from Lenny. So I'd say in 99% of the cases you get nothing.
Well, I expect the common use case here would be users trying to
select software in stable (or maybe testing).
> > Also, would it be possible to get an API for uploading screenshots?
> > (I say that as if I had any clue how to invoke such an API...)
>
> There is one. It uses the HTTP protocol. :) Just do an HTTP POST request
> and send the three fields like in the upload form.
Err...when I go to upload I get a webform, not a URL to point to? How
do I generate an "HTTP POST request" in C++? Open a TCP socket and send
some magic down it? I guess I can find an RFC with the right Google
query...
> > I imagine that automatically fetching
> > thumbnails for an entire list of a few hundred packages would be poor
> > manners.
>
> Let's find a better way to do that if you need more than what's usually
> requested via the web interface. Traffic is less the problem than CPU load
> probably. Unless you just do that once of course.
To explain my offhand comment more clearly.
Let's just say, hypothetically speaking, that I'm the developer of a
GUI package manager for Debian. It would be nice (where by nice I mean
*really UBERCOOL*) if, whenever users see a list of packages, they could
see a little thumbnail next to each package with a screenshot of the
package. When the user mouses over the screenshot, I could pop up a
tooltip and fetch the full image into it.
My comment was that while I think this would be a really nice feature
for my software, it seems like it would probably put too much of a burden
on your resources. I doubt there's any way to do this in a way that
decreases the load, but maybe you have ideas I'm missing.
> > Do you think you can handle fetching the thumbnail of each
> > package the user clicks on?
>
> I currently do. Or how do you mean?
When the user clicks on a package in the GUI interface, they see the
description of the package. I don't know what sort of load this would
impose once the interface is out of "beta", but I'm guessing it's a lot
more than you're seeing through the Web service.
I'd like to make good use of this service, but I don't want to turn
it into a smoking crater in the process. ;-) I don't really know what
image-fetches-per-second translates into at your end, so I guess I'm
looking for some guidance.
Daniel
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