On Tuesday 09 September 2008, Philip Van Hoof wrote: > I would perhaps accept an amendment to the specification mentioning the > possibility of canceling *some* of the thumbnailers's tasks. Without any > guarantees for success.
Right. IMHO you focus too much on a specific and very low level interpretation of cancellation. In a lot of cases the cancel should just stop processing the queue as soon as possible. I am quite confident that nobody will assume "stop right after this machine instruction". If one delegates processing to a service, cancelling is the method of conveying that you are no longer interested in a result. I don't think it depends on an implementation detail such as thread-based or process-based to tell a worker to stop at the next checkpoint it reaches. Just because it is technically possible to hard kill a process doesn't mean will ever want to do that since one can easily create stale lock files, SHM semaphores, etc. that way. Since there is usually more than one way to implement a thumbnail algorithm, having a spec with cancel capabilities gives hint to developers of such implementations that they should probably think about where to put check points. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring
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