MEta-data in Konqueror file tooltips

[Martijn Klingens]

On Friday 02 May 2003 12:20, David Faure wrote:
> Yes, something like that - although some people might even want to get
> metadata over SMB etc.? This is again a matter of defining "fast enough".
> Maybe the solution is to use the same config as the "list of protocols from
> which to get thumbnails", after renaming that list to something more
> general.

"fast enough" for me is my local LAN, since 100mbit is fast enough. Internet 
however is not.

In offices with multiple subnets (like at my work) that's still hard to get 
right without config option, and if your internet connection is fast enough 
you may even want to enable meta data and thumbnails over the internet.

In general there are three factors that determine the "fast enough", besides 
the amount of patience of the user:

- The amount of hops the server is away (generally higher latency even if the
  overall speed is high)
- The amount of bandwidth your connection has (LAN is fast, but internet
  usually isn't fast enough)
- The size of the files (thumbnail previews and meta data for a 20kb readme
  file are very welcome even over my ADSL link, but for files that are larger
  I surely don't want them eating my bandwidth)

Next to this there are secondary concerns like whether you want to use 
bandwidth and sockets at all, putting potentially unnecessary strain on the 
entire route, including the server. Especially FTP servers tend to have 
limits on the concurrent number of connections and not being able to download 
a file because thumbs are being generated is rather annoying. I had that a 
few times in the past with older KDE versions.

Now, with all the above in mind: would there be ways to make previews and meta 
data be available more clever and also work over the network, but ONLY if the 
network is considered "fast enough" ?

-- 
Martijn