avoid repeatly download model icons into not persistent temporary directory

[stardiviner]

chatgpt-shell/chatgpt-shell.el

Line 3024 in c5b9394

(cache-dir (file-name-concat (temporary-file-directory) "chatgpt-shell" mode))

I suggest to use cache directory like $HOME/.cache or $HOME/.config/emacs/.cache etc.

[xenodium]

Thanks for filing. How frequently are the icons downloading for you? If not that frequent, one upside at the moment is that we're automatically keeping up with latest icons.

[stardiviner]

Everytime I restart Emacs and use this package, icons need to be re-download into temporary directory.
About upside of keeping up with latest icons, I think could add a command to re-download icons for this purpose. WDYT?

[djr7C4]

IMO a nice way to handle it would be to download the icons asynchronously. That would avoid the slight lag and messages about downloading the icons the first time you run chatgpt-shell-swap-model. We could load them asynchronously at startup using url-retrieve for example and then avoid refreshing them when swapping the model.

[stardiviner]

IMO a nice way to handle it would be to download the icons asynchronously. That would avoid the slight lag and messages about downloading the icons the first time you run chatgpt-shell-swap-model. We could load them asynchronously at startup using url-retrieve for example and then avoid refreshing them when swapping the model.

Download icons asynchonously is a bad idea, it will caused failed on first invoke chatgpt-shell-swap-model.
Asume if user only invoke this command only once, and icons is not shown immediately, then what's the meaning for it?

And download on everytime Emacs restart async will cause burden on network and Emacs startup time.

I think cache is necessary to avoid upper two situations.

[djr7C4]

It's easy enough to check if the icon files exist and only use them if they do. That will avoid any error. Fetching them asynchronously will not use any additional resources compared to the current implementation.

IMO using a command is a bad idea because it forces the user to manually update the icons which is a low-level detail that they shouldn't have to worry about.

[stardiviner]

What about add an Emacs timer to check icons cache and timer auto download icons.
I don't know whether this will add complexity for code to implement this.
But I think Emacs timer is too frequent to download icons.

[djr7C4]

It's pretty easy to use timers in elisp with run-with-timer. I don't see the advantage over downloading them asynchronously at startup though. This solution seems similar but will download them multiple times per Emacs session.

[xenodium]

Hiya folks... we may be overthinking this a little. Today, I rebooted my laptop. I launched Emacs, swapped LLM models and the icons all downloaded in a split second. How long is your download taking? A second? Multiple seconds? More than 3? 10? Mind you, after this initial download, everything was instant.

[djr7C4]

It's pretty fast. My own preference is to load everything ahead of time so that everything will always be instant. I also find it a bit jarring to think I'm going to be selecting a model and suddenly see messages about files downloading when I didn't expect it. I'll just call the icon download code in my init.el though which will fix this for me.

[stardiviner]

Yes, this problem is over-thinked. I hope maintainer can modify code a little, save into a user home cache directory like ~/.cache instead of /tmp which will delete icons after restart. Let user choose whether he want to download icons everytime reboot Emacs session. So back to my first opinion,

chatgpt-shell/chatgpt-shell.el

Line 3024 in c5b9394

(cache-dir (file-name-concat (temporary-file-directory) "chatgpt-shell" mode))

. Change into ~/.cache will be a good idea. When icon file exist, then don't need to download, download until it does not exist. We can exclude the situation that icon updated.
The icons are hosted on GitHub, in China, GitHub downloading is blocked. Even thought I can access GitHub now. But sometimes VPN will failed.