Subject: Re: bug#71180: [ELPA Feature Request] Package thumbnail

From: Philip Kaludercic <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 May 2024 11:01:28 +0000

Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]> writes:

> tags 71180 - notabug
> severity 71180 wishlist
> thanks
>
> "Elijah G." <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> Tags: notabug
>>
>> Hi, i'm wondering if would be a good idea add support for thumbnail for
>> elpa packages (for elpa website and package-menu *Help* buffers).
>> I think this is a missing feature that most other editors and non-editors
>> does (such as synaptic and vscodium).

I am not sure if you mean this as a kind of "logo" or as a kind of
screenshot?  I assume you mean the latter.

>> My idea is to only support 1 image (jpg or png, adding more than 1
>> thumbnail would be hard to read the package *Help* buffer) and resize it
>> (if possible) for not take all the buffer size.
>>
>> For packages developers i think would be fine define new header comment
>> line for let them to choose which image they want to use, something like:
>> ;;; Thumbnail: ./image.png

If anything, I think it would be best to mandate SVG, which after all we
can easily generate using (x-export-frames nil 'svg), if supported.
That should solve the scaling issue.  AFAIK we currently don't support
animated SVGs in Emacs, right?  That might be a nice feature for some
packages.

Two points I am not fond of is that screenshots on sites like GitHub are
often not uniform and contain a lot of noise.  It would be nice if we
could give some guidelines, or better yet generate the screenshots
ourselves from a given sequence of keys.  That might not be nice from a
security or performance perspective and could still be circumvented.

Otherwise, I also dislike the notion of having package developers
version effectively binary data (especially if we are dealing with
non-vector graphics) in their repositories -- if one can't meaningfully
generate a patch whenever the file changes, I take the position that one
should think twice about versioning it in a Git repository.

>> Thanks.
>
> I think this could be a good idea, but it would also depend on how the
> idea is executed.  We would obviously need knobs to turn it off, the
> feature would need to be tested on text displays, etc.

If we are talking about screenshots, that these aren't hard
requirements to understand what a package does, just as describe-package
can do its job now without the help of images.  Visual examples should
be regarded as an enchantment, where they make sense.

> Instead of a header comment, we could just say that the thumbnail should
> always be called "thumb.png" and be in the root directory of the
> package, or something along those lines.

I agree that would be better.

-- 
	Philip Kaludercic on peregrine