Comment 8 for bug 1350598

As far as the profile change for the thumbnailer is concerned, it can wait. It's not the end of the world if we can't get at the parameters on the client side for the time being.

I don't want to belittle all the work that's already gone into the policy compilation, so please don't take this the wrong way! We are currently discussing some additional thumbnailer features. If they are to go ahead, it'll require adding a new DBus method, which we can't do because of the policy compilation cost.

In other words, we have a rather serious catch-22: the policy mechanism is so expensive to reconfigure that it prevents us from adding new features to services. Obviously, that's bad.

Could we maybe do the compilation at the end of the upgrade process, before the restart? At that point, we still can do progress indicators and, because the user expects upgrades to be slow, the experience would be better that way.

If this isn't possible, at least showing a progress indicator during the boot instead of a black screen would make a huge difference. I think the problem isn't necessarily that things are slow, but that there is absolutely no feedback.