Specifying thumbnailers as a service

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:49:31 +0200 Philip Van Hoof wrote:

> I think canceling is overkill. Making a thumbnail doesn't take longer
> than a minute (and a minute is an extreme case). Users don't cancel
> that.

Strongly disagree.  I have a laptop, and say I'm on battery power.  If
I'm scrolling through a big list of images in my file manager, and it's
requesting thumbnails, they all get queued.  Say I find the file I want
near the end of the list (by file name, not thumbnail) and close the
file manager window... but the thumbnail service keeps chugging along,
uselessly creating thumbnails for 10s or 100s of files, pegging the CPU
and wasting my battery life.  I wouldn't be particularly happy about
that.

Cancellation could be easily implemented by returning an ID from the
Create request that can be used to cancel the operation.  On the daemon
side, canceling the request could be as easy as killing a subprocess,
depending on implementation...

	-brian