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). Thanks --- footnotes [1] http://jens.triq.net/thumbnail-spec/index.html -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list xdg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg