Re: [Gramps-devel] Relative path problem for 3.0

[Alvaro H. <alv...@al...>]

Benny Malengier wrote:
> We have a serious design problem in 3.0
> 
> It concerns relative media paths no longer working in 3.0. See also bug
> http://bugs.gramps-project.org/view.php?id=1208
> 
> Reason:
> In 2.2.x user has a grdb/xml file somewhere on his disk in a dir by his
> choosing. Relative path is related to that position. In 3.0 all databases
> are kept in ~/.gramps/grampsdb/<some number>.
> So in 3.0 a relative path would be ../../../genea_dir/images, not really
> something you want to show to Aunt Martha. Moreover conversion from
> 2.2.xdatabase to
> 3.0 fails to find the paths on upgrade.
> 
> Note, due to some bug, the method to calculate relative path doesn't give
> correct info anymore in 3.0, so adding relative paths media is impossible in
> trunk at the moment.
> 
> How do we solve this? Many people use relative paths so as to switch between
> computers/OS.

How about having a separate variable, "base dir for media", a
database-wide setting, which is prepended to objects at the time of
opening.  So for the example above you could have the media itself in
the database as "images/foo.jpg" and the base_dir as
"../../../genea_dir".

The conversion process could "somehow" (/me handwaves) convert the paths
as needed.

To Aunt Martha you could just allow her to pick an absolute path, or
even better, a path relative from $HOME (so internally save it as
~/media/martha/images, and at runtime expand ~ to $HOME).

-- 
Alvaro Herrera                               http://www.PlanetPostgreSQL.org/
"If it wasn't for my companion, I believe I'd be having
the time of my life"  (John Dunbar)