Proposed draft for the thumbnail D-Bus specification

[Kevin Krammer]

On Tuesday 09 September 2008, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

> I would perhaps accept an amendment to the specification mentioning the
> possibility of canceling *some* of the thumbnailers's tasks. Without any
> guarantees for success.

Right. IMHO you focus too much on a specific and very low level interpretation 
of cancellation.
In a lot of cases the cancel should just stop processing the queue as soon as 
possible.

I am quite confident that nobody will assume "stop right after this machine 
instruction".

If one delegates processing to a service, cancelling is the method of 
conveying that you are no longer interested in a result.

I don't think it depends on an implementation detail such as thread-based or 
process-based to tell a worker to stop at the next checkpoint it reaches.
Just because it is technically possible to hard kill a process doesn't mean 
will ever want to do that since one can easily create stale lock files, SHM 
semaphores, etc. that way.

Since there is usually more than one way to implement a thumbnail algorithm, 
having a spec with cancel capabilities gives hint to developers of such 
implementations that they should probably think about where to put check 
points.

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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