Specifying thumbnailers as a service

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-08-29 at 11:22 +0100, Rob Taylor wrote:
> 
>> I wonder if it'd make sense to allow multiple services to provide 
>> thumbnailing for different mime types. This could be done by having the 
>> thumbnailing service(s) register bus names of the form 
>> org.freedesktop.thumbnailer.<mime type>, and the application could look 
>> up the bus name for the mime type of the file it wishes to thumbnail, 
>> and dbus-activation would take care of running the appropriate service.
> 
> This makes sense to me. 

This sounds overly complicated to me.  Now you're assuming that any app 
that wants to load thumbnails is also capable of figuring out the 
mime-type of the file it wants to load.  For a file manager, sure, but I 
don't think any app that could potentially want thumbnails should have 
to be mime-type-aware.

I can understand the viewpoint of a proprietary format that wants to 
implement a thumbnailer, but this can be done with a single thumbnailing 
'server' by allowing the thumbnailing server to exec external processes 
to do the work.  The only other reason I'd see for this would be to have 
process separation for various thumbnailers, but that can still be 
accomplished if you're really that afraid of buggy thumbnailers bringing 
down the service (which should just get restarted via dbus activation 
anyway).

	-brian