Review of the thumbnailer spec

[Alexander Larsson]

 On Fri, 2009-05-15 at 04:00 +0200, Jannis Pohlmann wrote:

> I think we should improve the description of Unqueue a little bit.
> Unqueue doesn't really prevent service-side implementations of unqueing
> batch tasks (more than one URI queued as one handle) in the middle of
> the task (e.g. after having generated thumbnails for 2 out of 10 URIs).
>
>   This is exactly what e.g. file managers need though. Just imagine a
> file manager enters a directory, queues all its files for thumbnailing
> and then switches the directory before all files are processed by the
> thumbnailer. So IMHO it should be pointed out more clearly that this is
> not a violation of the spec. Right now it just says "You can't unqueue
> requests that are currently running." This should be something like
> "You cannot cancel the processing of individual URIs but thumbnailers
> are free to support cancelling running tasks between the processing two
> URIs when a task unqueued."

I don't think using this spec from a file manager is really a good idea,
its quite a lot of overhead doing all this dbus i/o when loading a large
directory. I certainly won't be using it in nautilus.

I brought this up with philip when this was initially proposed, and the
sense that I got from him was not that the file manager is meant to
consume this interface, but rather to implement it.