[Thunar-dev] Xfce 4.8 schedule changes

[Daniel Morales]

Hey,

I saw a port-to-garcon branch on xfdesktop Git, but as a start thing...
besides that, is there any other work around Gio/gudev? maybe some
local?. I just want to make sure, before start writing the patches.

Regards,


Daniel~


On Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:28:49 +0100
Jannis Pohlmann <jannis at xfce.org> wrote:

> Hey everyone,
> 
> as the Xfce release manager, I'd prefer to be the bringer of good
> news. Unfortunately, we have to make some adjustments with regards to
> the Xfce 4.8 release schedule. 
> 
> You may well remember last year's chaos with the 4.6 release date.
> We're trying our best not to repeat that and if it should happen
> again, we'll at least keep you posted about the issues as good as we
> can.
> 
> So, what's the deal with 4.8? 
> 
> One thing that hasn't changed much is that our development team is
> very small. A hobby project of this size requires a certain amount of
> time to be invested by each individual developer. Time not everyone
> has as much has he would like to dedicate to Xfce. 
> 
> Today, Brian announced his absence for the coming months due to his
> new job, leaving 2-3 of our core components (xfdesktop, xfconf and
> xfce4-session) more or less unmaintained (aside from bugfixes). The
> good news is that Jérôme (who has recently started to improve
> xfce4-settings and port xfce4-session to libxfce4ui) and Daniel (the
> maintainer of the thunar-shares-plugin) have offered their help with
> xfdesktop and xfce4-session.
> 
> Brian is not the only one having little time at hand though. I'm
> preparing myself for my final university exams, so ideally I'd be
> sticking my nose into lecture notes all day long. I still have the
> time to write mails like this but there hasn't been much activity
> around thunar and related projects lately.
> 
> Again, I'm really happy to see people volunteering to help because
> that's what we need right now. There's a lot left to do before we can
> release 4.8. Let me get to that now.
> 
> As some of might have heard, thunar was ported to GIO this summer.
> Through GVfs, GIO brings new features such as SMB, SFTP, FTP browsing
> which some people use one a daily basis already. Now, GVfs has turned
> out to be problematic for us for various reasons. At first it shipped
> a HAL-based volume monitor with a hard-coded dependency on
> gnome-mount. Today it ships a volume monitor based on
> gnome-disk-utility (uses DeviceKit-disks itself) which proves to be
> inconsistent and somewhat incompatible to the HAL mounting code in
> exo. 
> 
> The result: thunar-volman (not part of the core but important for
> thunar nonetheless) and xfdesktop will have to be ported to udev (the
> mounting being done with GIO, ideally). I've started working on this
> but this is far from being finished.
> 
> (Question to the other developers: Didn't xfce4-session use HAL for
>  logging out and stuff? We might have to look into replacing those
>  portions of code with something based on ConsoleKit, I guess?)
> 
> HAL/udev is not the only issue however. With Xfce 4.8 we'll be
> replacing libxfcegui4 with a new library called libxfce4ui. Not all
> core applications (again, xfdesktop being one of them, I think) have
> been ported to it yet. In most cases, this is no big deal and probably
> could be resolved within a few days though.
> 
> Then we have garcon, the much improved menu library that is supposed
> to replace libxfce4menu. At the time of writing the only feature it is
> lacking that is crucial for 4.8 is file system monitoring. We'll
> probably implement basic monitoring like we had in libxfce4menu.
> Work on this hasn't started yet. 
> 
> Also, xfdesktop needs to be ported not only from ThunarVFS/HAL to
> GIO/udev but also from libxfce4menu to garcon.
> 
> So, as you can see there is quite a lot of work ahead of us. Taking
> into account the little free time some of us have these days, we've
> decided to postpone the 4.8 release until June 12th instead of April
> 12th. The entire release phase in our schedule has been moved by two
> months in time, as you can see on the official schedule wiki page:
> 
>   http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.8/schedule
> 
> To be honest, I wouldn't consider this new date fixed either. It all
> depends on how much we can do until the feature freeze on April 1st.
> I'm optimistic that meeting the deadlines is possible though. 
> 
> For all of you who can't wait until June, try out our development
> releases which are announced on http://identi.ca/xfce. I have at least
> *something* good to share: For a few weeks now I've been running
> Fedora 12 with a mixture of Xfce 4.6 packages and development package
> from the upcoming 4.8 series and the new components have proven to be
> very stable already. 
> 
> I'm especially happy about the new panel which works almost flawlessly
> (except for a few dual head issues) and not only supports real
> transparency and more comfortable launcher creation based on garcon,
> but is also compatible to panel plugins written for Xfce 4.6. (Good
> work, Nick!)
> 
> So, I guess this is it. A mixture of good and bad. I hope nobody is
> too disappointed. As always, we're doing the best we can.
> 
> Cheers,
> Jannis

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