[Gimp-developer] proposal for managing resources such as brushes, gradients, etc

[Aurimas Juška]

On Jan 17, 2008 7:45 PM, William Skaggs <weskaggs at primate.ucdavis.edu> wrote:
>
> 2) If they are stored in a separate database, keyed by file
> names, then there is a great danger of losing the linkage
> between tags and object.  If, for example, the user renames
> the directory holding some brushes, all of the tags for those
> brushes will be lost.  The only way to prevent this sort of
> thing from happening is to make sure that all operations
> on resource files are mediated by Gimp (or some new
> utility program) that will make sure to keep the tags in
> sync with the data files.  If for some reason a user's tags
> database gets corrupted, it will be a major disaster.
>
I don't see any disaster. Here is one possible solution: store some
sort of checksum (let's say, MD5) together with filename in the
database.
Let's say user renames file. If new filename is found with the same
checksum, simply change the filename in database and that's it -
you've got completely correct database once again.
This could be a little more tricky at runtime (scan in background?),
but not a disaster, really.