Code review comment for lp:~jamesh/ubuntu-ui-toolkit/albumart-dbus

The album art image provider is conceptually the same as thumbnailer image provider. The latter says "get me a thumbnail for this file" and the former is "get me an image of this album". There is already code for this in the Dash (and I think duplicated in Unity8) but that is not the correct place for it for obvious reasons.

As far as dependencies go, this does not add any extra dependencies. The UITK part is just a dbus call (the actual generation happens in a service provided by libthumbnailer). If the album art service is not running (as it probably won't on precise), the code returns the default image. The dependency on >=1.1 of thumbnailer and thumbnailer-service is just to declare this and can be changed to just libthumbnailer>=1.0 if that makes supporting precise easier (note that neither AlbumArtGenerator.cpp nor AlbumArtGenerator.h includes anything from libthumbnnailer so they will compile and link just fine).

We proposed this for the UITK because we feel that it should be as widely available as the thumbnailing image provider is. That being said the current users are the shell and the music player app. If you feel that this code has a better location somewhere else then we are glad to work with you to find one. It is a very small change, after all.