Specifying thumbnailers as a service

[Rob Taylor]

Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> Not only filemanagers want to request the creation of a thumbnail. For
> example desktop search engines like Strigi and Tracker want to schedule
> the creation of thumbnails for certain of the contents that they find,
> ahead of time (not sure about Strigi, as one of Tracker's developers
> myself I'm sure about Tracker).
> 
> This is why we would like to have a desktop wide DBus API for requesting
> the creation of a thumbnail. Not just a specification about how to store
> the thumbnails and where you can find them [1], but also a method to
> request thumbnails.
> 
> We want to reuse the infrastructure that is available.
> 
> We want to request the creation of a thumbnail for rather a lot of items
> so this API would have to accept a an array of paths to thumbnail-able
> items. When finished it would return an array of paths to the
> thumbnails.
> 
> For example (this is glib-dbus XML api)
> 
> <node name="/">
>   <interface name="org.freedesktop.Thumbnailer">  
>     <method name="Create">
>       <annotation name="org.freedesktop.DBus.GLib.Async" value="true"/>
>       <arg type="as" name="uris" direction="in" />
>       <arg type="i" name="size_x" direction="in" />
>       <arg type="i" name="size_y" direction="in" />
>       <arg type="as" name="thumbnails" direction="out" />
>     </method>
>     <method name="Move">
>       <annotation name="org.freedesktop.DBus.GLib.Async" value="true"/>
>       <arg type="as" name="from_uris" direction="in" />
>       <arg type="as" name="to_uris" direction="in" />
>     </method>
>     <method name="Delete">
>       <annotation name="org.freedesktop.DBus.GLib.Async" value="true"/>
>       <arg type="as" name="uris" direction="in" />
>     </method>
>   </interface>
> </node>
> 
> Nobody does something for no reason. Our own reason for wanting this is
> to have a platform wide thumbnailer for the Maemo platform and we want
> it aligned with upstream projects.
> 
> A thumbnail service on a mobile platform is not going to have the same
> requirements as a thumbnail service on a KDE or a GNOME platform. It's
> my opinion that although the requirements are going to be different, the
> API for requesting the creation of a thumbnail isn't.
> 
> Therefore, and this is a strong opinion of me:
> 
> We make it more easy for our application developers if we cooperate on a
> DBus standard at the level of freedesktop.org, instead of each having
> our own client APIs for this.
> 
> We can help with the work on patches for Nautilus and Konqueror.
> 
> ps. Filemanagers could either become the providers of these DBus APIs,
> this is probably the most easy change, or if the architecture is chosen
> to offshore this functionality to a daemon they could be adapted to
> consume the DBus API instead.
> 
> My proposal is *not* about having one great thumbnailer. If different
> teams want to compete on a thumbnailer implementation, then they must
> compete and that way drive innovation. This proposal is about the DBus
> API only for it (to see if we can reach an agreement on that).
> 


Hi Philip

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 would then allow proprietary providers of thumbnailing services for 
proprietary file types, or applications to provide thumbnailing of their 
own file types. However, I don't know if in general an application knows 
a file's mime type before it asks for the file. Of course, a plugin api 
for the thumbnailing daemon would also have much the same properties and 
may be simpler, though loosing the process protection.

Just an idea ;)

In terms of the above proposed API, I'm guessing that the 'thumbnails' 
out paramater on Create is returning a list of uris, which are 'freed' 
from use by the application by the Delete function? Also what is the 
Move method for?

Thanks,
Rob


> Thanks
> 
> 
> --- footnotes
> [1] http://jens.triq.net/thumbnail-spec/index.html
> 


-- 
Rob Taylor, Codethink Ltd. - http://codethink.co.uk