ThunarThumbnailer => exo?

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hey guys,

with the ongoing work on the ThunarThumbnailer class, which is the
client-side implementation of the thumbnail management D-Bus
specification (the service side is implemented by tumbler), I wonder if
it wouldn't make sense to move the class into exo once it's more
complete.

The reason for this is that, despite the fact that D-Bus clients are
usually very easy to implement with DBusGProxy, most applications like
ristretto and Thunar share a few requirements that are not so easy to
implement. They can generate a lot of thumbnail requests and their GUI
needs to remain responsive all the time.

ThunarThumbnailer implements some clever tricks to achieve this. It
uses asynchronous D-Bus calls, processes D-Bus signals in idle handlers
and, since last night, uses a wait queue and a 100ms time slot to group
individual requests into larger bundles to reduce the D-Bus message
overhead.

Right now it's depending on ThunarFile but we can change that. We can
add "thumbnails-loading", "thumbnails-ready" and "thumbnails-failed"
signals to ThunarThumbnailer so that applications using it can decide
how and in what situations they want to update their file
representations (e.g. ThunarFile).

I could also make the API more complete (e.g. implement Unqueue()
properly and make the method to check whether a MIME type is supported
public, stuff like that) before.

So... I think I'd love to see this being moved into exo. 
What do you think?

  - Jannis
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