Fellow devs...
Paul Wise asked me say a few words about my current project. A while ago
(in July) I posted [0] on debian-devel@l.d.o stating my intention to
provide a more or less simple web service to store screenshots of Debian
applications. I was a tad busy since then (GSoC, paid work) and didn't
finish the project within a week as I intended. But right now I have my
IDE open and hope to be able to show something working soon (I'm 50%
done). I noticed that the games team maintains a games-screenshots package
so I'd thought you might be interested and I'm of course interested in
your opinions. Some basic data:
- Designated site: http://screenshots.debian.net (already registered)
- Hardware: Shares a sponsored server with mentors.debian.net.
~20 GB of disk space is available. I intend to make 10 GB
available for screenshots.
- Authentication: As I don't have direct access to LDAP authentication
for DDs I currently allow only people with a @debian.org
email address to sign up for an account. This it not
perfect because Debian Maintainers and sponsorees should
be able to upload screenshots for their own packages,
too. Perhaps the registration email should allow anyone
with a $USER@packages.debian.org address.
- Web software: Moderately simple WSGI application run on Pylons (a Python
MVC framework) using a PostgreSQL database and a little
hard disk space to keep the screenshot files.
- URL schema can be customized (thanks to the flexibility of an MVC
framework). So URLs like http://screenshots.debian.net/$PACKAGE
(screenshots page for a certain package) or even a SOAP interface are
easily possible. packages.debian.org could for example add an IMG
tag to the packages page linking to
http://screenshots.debian.net/$PACKAGE/firstthumbnail that could
return either an existing screenshot thumbnail or a dummy picture
saying that there is not yet a screenshot available.
- Screenshot storage: I intend to shrink uploaded packages to 800x600
and prepare a thumbnail like 100x75, too. I'm
confident that 800x600 would carry enough
information.
- Management: Uploading, browsing and deleting of screenshots for own
applications will happen through a simple to use
web interface.
- Screenshot style: on debian-devel it was argued whether screenshots
should contain no or a predefined kind of window
decorations. But actually that doesn't really matter.
And besides an application without window decorations
looks pretty stupid.
[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/07/msg00770.html
Cheers
Christoph
--
A guess is just a guess until you turn it into a pie chart.
Then it's an analysis. (Scott Adams)
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