Proposed draft for the thumbnail D-Bus specification

[David Faure]

On Wednesday 10 September 2008, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> > > If you indeed set up that specification and if you make a desktop
> > > neutral prototype and it indeed becomes part of freedesktop, I'd be
> > > happy to let this org.freedesktop.thumbnailer.Generic use the
> > > specialized resizers in org.freedesktop.imageresizer instead of its own
> > > specialized thumbnailers in org.freedesktop.thumbnailer implementing
> > > org.freedesktop.thumbnailer.Thumbnailer.
> > 
> > Yeah sure, reply with "you do the work" to make sure you win because I don't
> > have time for this. There is no need for a separate imageresizer service,
> > all we need is a bit more flexibility in the thumbnailer service.
> 
> What makes you believe I have time for this? I sure hope you don't think
> you are the only busy person on the planet, right? :)

So you post a spec on freedesktop.org as a proposed standard and you refuse
to take any comments into account because "you don't have time" ??
You're the one working on this, I don't accept this argument.
What do you think I did when working on the trash spec?
Do you think I replied to every comment with "do it yourself"?

> You want the big class that will solve all of the problems of this
> earth's humanity.

Yeah, god knows two ints and a bool (or splitting up a service into two)
are the only things missing to solve all problems of humanity. Come on!

> Quite a lot of well known computer scientists, including but not only
> people like Brad Adams, have been trying to explain us that a class must
> be good at doing one thing ... but only one thing. A class must not try
> to solve the world.

In what ways does kio_thumbnail solve the world exactly? I'd love to know.
The architecture I'm proposing is based on a real-world solution, don't
derive into talking about the universe and God.

> I conclude that you are really trying to stuff the entire solution of
> the entire world's problems into one class.

Not at all, you're the one doing that!
I presented a design with two layers:
 * upper layer: thumbnail-spec handling
 * the layer below: data-to-image previewing

Instead, you want to stuff it all into one service which does it all, in a black-box
kind of way which doesn't give enough control to the application.

> [...]
> 			throw new GodDoesNotExistException();
> [...]
Can we please stick to the problem at hand instead of deriving into nonsense?

> Yes, we have heard this kind of "If you don't do what I say, then it's
> useless for us!!!" crap repeatedly. I don't really like that style of
> bullying engineering.

Why ask for comments in the first place, then? Just go ahead and do your
thing, but don't call it a freedesktop specification.

> I have to do something for YOU

No, you have to take into accounts the comments you get, when you post
a candidate specification and request comments.
What do you think I did when working on the trash spec?

> I also disagree with the architecture that you propose. I would agree
> with an architecture where the thumbnailer one depends on a generic
> resize one.

Then go for it, it's the proper solution.

Otherwise, well, implement whatever you want, but based on this discussion,
I formally object to this becoming an FDO standard.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).