[Thunar-dev] future thunar plans?

[Benedikt Meurer]

Nick Schermer wrote:
> What is the exact reason (advantages) the add desktop
> support to Thunar? Because you probably have a good reason
> for doing this. (Faster start up Thunar (desktop is daemon),
> Run dialog, better integration with vfs and extensions)?
> 
> I'd really like to know :).

The most important problem is duplication of code. Brian had to write a
lot of code that was already present in Thunar (for example, Thunar now
offers a "Send To" menu, which would need to be added to xfdesktop as
well). The next problem is the unified look, which is somewhat part of
the first issue. For example, both the context menu and the properties
dialog look slightly different; this has several causes, for example,
not all functionality of Thunar will be available in xfdesktop (i.e. the
"Open With" dialog). Furtheron, the memory overhead is noticable (5MB
unshared data for xfdesktop is not that bad, but that's atleast 4MB that
could be saved if Thunar manages the desktop itself, 1MB will probably
be required for the XDG menu integration).

Afterall, you'll need to take into account that the desktop icon support
in xfdesktop is a temporary solution, because we agreed that it was not
possible to add that for Thunar 1.0.

> Greets,
> Nick

greets,
Benedikt