[Tuxpaint-devel] Managing large # of stamps

[Ben A. <sy...@sa...>]

It is encouraging to see the stamps divided into smaller subsets now. 
But I still can't decide how to deal with this in Debian.  For one
thing, 16 packages is a lot of new packages if I were to just create a
new package per category.  For another, it still doesn't help me choose
which stamps (if any) to install by default.  I could install just a few
of these by default, but which ones?  And even if I did decide on, say:
animals, food, people, plants, symbols, town and vehicles as being
reasonable "core" categories, with clothes, hobbies, household, medical,
military, naturalforces, seasonal, space and sports being considered
"extra", that's still 247 stamps!  Or let's say just one category:
animals.  There are 47 stamps in this category!

Clearly this approach isn't working.  How about a "sampler" package that
contains a few from each of the "core" categories listed above (we can
haggle later about what's in "core")?  There is a potential issue with
this approach: if something's in the sampler package, do we remove it
from the "extra" packages?  What if someone wants some of the stamps in
the sampler, but not the whole sampler?

Here's a different tack: do we need to break it down very much at the
level of packages?  What if we just install *all* of the stamps, and
allow tuxpaint to be easily configure to select some arbitrary subset? 
For example, we could have a "Stamps" tab in tuxpaint-config that
presents a tree of categories & stamps with checkboxes by each directory
& by individual stamps, with a stamp preview pane to allow the admin to
decide.  This would allow an admin to, for instance, select different
subsets for children of different ages, or rotate the "seasonal" stamps,
only enabling certain subsets at certain times of year.

A cheap way of providing this degree of admin control is to just allow a
different path to be specified for stamps, i.e. a --stampspath variable
that can be set to a colon-separated list of paths.  Then the admin can
create a /usr/local/share/tuxpaint/stamps populated with symlinks to the
desired categories, or even to individual stamps.

Ben