Re: Glycin thumbnailers in Debian
On Sat, Aug 16, 2025 at 7:27 PM Matthias Geiger <werdahias@riseup.net> wrote:
> glycin in 2.x has the option to build a thumbnailer [0]. In addition, gdk-pixbuf now has
> the option to build its thumbnailer with libglycin [1]. libglycin is a C
> library compiled from Rust (and src:glycin). I think both are things we
> want to enable since the rust code is memory safe. I will definitely
> enable the glycin-own thumbnailer. Regarding gdk-pixbufs thumbnailer, I
> would like to hear the teams' opinions on that. This could be enabled
> only conditionally on the release arches for the time being. Upstream
> noted the only downside are the loaders being Linux-only since they rely
> on libseccomp.
>
> Links:
>
> [0]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glycin/-/tree/main/glycin-thumbnailer?ref_type=heads
> [1]: https://blogs.gnome.org/sophieh/2025/06/13/making-gnomes-gdkpixbuf-image-loading-safer/
The blog post recommends disabling gdk-pixbuf's own thumbnailer and
using glycin's thumbnailer instead (which Ubuntu has packaged with the
binary package name glycin-thumbnailers).
glycin is not available on several non-release architectures [3]. My
understanding is that we need to keep a binary package available in
release architectures for it to be available in ports. I might be
mistaken on that detail. However, Ubuntu would rather not build glycin
on i386 but Ubuntu does build gdk-pixbuf for i386. Therefore, this is
easy to resolve by keeping the gdk-pixbuf thumbnailers and the
without-glycin build option on i386 and the ports where glycin isn't
available.
Currently, the gdk-pixbuf thumbnailers are included with some other
utilities in libgdk-pixbuf2.0-bin so maybe we should split those
thumbnailers to a separate binary package?
[3] https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=glycin
Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha
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