Renaming of Xfce components

[Brian J. Tarricone]

/me looks at the date

Oof.  Well done, Jannis.  You got me.

     -b

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 13:59, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> [Why is this posted to xfce@?]
>
> Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
>
>> In an IRC meeting we had yesterday we've decided to strip "xfce"
>> from the names of some of our components and replace it with something
>> more generic that doesn't prevent people from using the libraries.
>
> Uh, what?  Please clarify this "we" you speak of.
>
>> Other renamings we have planned, all of which follow the "gtk", "glib",
>> "gio", "gnio" naming style:
>>
>>  libxfce4util    => gutil
>>  libxfcegui4     => gui
>>  xfce4-session   => gsession
>
> Have you talked to the glib folks about this?  Stepping on their
> namespace isn't a particularly nice thing to do.
>
>>  xfconf          => xdgconf (to emphasize that it should become the
>>                              config system backed up by freedesktop.org
>>                              in the near future)
>
> Frankly I don't think xfconf is suitable as a cross-desktop fd.o-blessed
> standard.  It has several design issues, the implementation is
> significantly less than optimal, and, as currently implemented, is a
> desktop start performance bottleneck.
>
> Also, while I intend to remedy this in a future major release, libxfconf
> is currently not async (it blocks the main loop waiting for dbus calls
> to complete), and I know several people will consider this a major
> blocker in considering xfconf as any kind of cross-desktop standard.
>
> In a word: no.  Xfconf is decent for us, and certainly a step up from
> MCS, but it's not suitable for cross-desktop prime-time.  If people are
> interested in getting it into shape, sure, let's solicit feedback and
> come up with a TODO list, but I wouldn't presume to change the name
> until *after* all that is complete and we have buy-in from fd.o, GNOME,
> and KDE (assuming such buy-in is even possible, and I'm skeptical about
> that).
>
>> I hope you all agree with me that this is once again a big step forward
>> for Xfce as a whole. It underlines our urge to play a more important
>> role in the cross desktop sector.
>
> Not really -- it's basically an attempt to genericise our components and
> co-opt other naming schemes without permission (while such 'permission'
> isn't strictly required, not soliciting it is a bit of a dick move).
>
> Jannis, feel free to rename libxfce4menu: it's your project, and its
> future direction is up to you.  But the other libraries should not
> change (especially libxfcegui4, which we're trying to kill off; we
> should try to get useful stuff in libxfce4util pushed to glib proper),
> and xfce4-session will most certainly remain xfce4-session.
>
>        -b
>
>