Specifying thumbnailers as a service

[Philip Van Hoof]

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 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 ;)

Ok

> 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?

To let the thumbnailer know that a thumbnail-able have been moved, so
that the thumbnailer can rename the thumbnail in a more efficient way
than that a delete + create would do.



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