What happened to my panel?

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 10:16 -0400, Patrick Wiseman wrote: 
> Well, that's the kind of lack of consideration I expect from KDE or GNOME 
> developers, not from Xfce.  Oh well, I guess I'll figure it out.

On Sun, 2006-06-18 at 17:05 +0200, Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
> That makes no sense at all. GNOME and KDE have lots of developers 
> (although probably not so much on specific key modules), and have a much 
> larger community, so it is more likely they will have the resources to 
> do this right.

I really don't like the attitude Patrick portrayed in general.  You
don't have to say one open source project is great by bashing others --
or say one project is "being like the others" which are then demonized.
It's counter-productive and its the "versus" marketing non-sense that we
left with the commercial software world.

Every project has a goal they are aiming for and the natural selection
of choice is the ultimate balance.

About the only thing I suggest is that when any major component changes,
and existing configuration files are not backward compatible, consider
incrementing the major version.  As long as projects do that, and give
me a warning of such a change, I have absolutely no problem.  If I want
more, I can contribute my time to helping.

> Anyway, the new panel is a complete rewrite that was required to provide 
> much-needed features like multiple panels, drag and drop support for 
> adding/moving/removing items and protection against crashing plugins by 
> making them external processes.

I'm still running XFCE 4.2.3 on Fedora Core 5.  I'm sure Fedora Core 6
will probably ship with XFCE 4.4.x, assuming it is released.

One thing I'd like to see is some uniformity between how the panel and
taskbar are configured.  Right now the configuration dialogs for
location, size, etc... are completely different -- even though they are
basically "two bars that can be moved around".

I'm a noob to XFCE in general, so I haven't done my homework, but are
they more uniform in 4.4?  Maybe a consideration for XFCE 5 if not.
It's easy to get "too generic" or go "overboard" with options -- but I'd
just like to see a little more configuration uniformity between the
panel and taskbar.  Just a suggestion, I haven't played with 4.4 myself
and am a noob to XFCE in general.

> Given the available resources it was basically impossible to provide 
> proper conversion from the old configuration to the new configuration. 
> Mind you, I'm not sure it would have been easy to do this at all, even 
> with enough resources.
> Does this mean I should not have done the rewrite? I'd like to think the 
> advantages outweigh the disadvantages, but I certainly could be wrong.

If there is a critical mass of developers, someone can write a
conversion script that takes the old panel configuration files and gives
you a base for the new news.  That's what community developed software
is all about.

If it's not important enough of an itch for someone to scratch, then
anyone who thinks it is should step up and do so.  Otherwise, be happy
we have what we have and don't play "versus" games or "demonize" the
goodwill of any project.

Again, I left that in the commercial world of one-liner marketing and
"my implementation of blah is better than your implementation."

Just my $0.02 ...

-- Bryan J. Smith
   XFCE user since 2006 June

-- 
Bryan J. Smith           Professional, technical annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org     http://thebs413.blogspot.com
----------------------------------------------------------
The existence of Linux has far more to do with the breakup
of AT&T's monopoly than anything Microsoft has ever done.