A bit of Rodent (Xffm) history. [long]

[Chuck Mead]

Ah..... the early days.... what a time we had eh?

--
Scudder Mead
scudder.mead at gmail.com
--
"I bet a lot more people would attend church if you could ssh in..." - ferry


On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 11:06, Edscott Wilson Garcia <edscott at xfce.org>wrote:

>
> Going back in time, Xfce started as a CDE clone. CDE was the "Common
> Desktop Environment" developed by HP, Sun, Digital and other big box
> players for their top notch workstations. Definitely cool. Definitely
> not for dummies.
>
> CDE had a neat filemanager called dtfile, but this was not open source,
> so Xfce used a variation of Rasca's "Xtree" called "Xftree" as a
> filemanager. I entered the show by extending Xftree's functionality with
> the "glob" search engine (now "fgr"), the samba network browser
> "Xfsamba", the differences viewer "Xfdiff" and a set of dtfile icons,
> among other things.
>
> Then came the migration to GTK-2. For this Xftree was rewritten as Xffm,
> retaining all the previous functionality and adding more. The dtfile
> icon set was replaced by Francois' Rodent icon theme. To distinguish
> Xffm as a part of Xfce, the first release was tagged 4.0.
>
> Then came 4.2 and the love/hate story started. Those new to Xfce could
> not understand why Xffm had such a steep learning curve, while those
> familiar to Xftree expected the nerdy behaviour they had become used to.
>
> Anyways, it was decided that Xfce would no longer distribute a
> filemanager: this way users could choose the new Thunar filemanager
> (which, as an independent software, would no longer follow the Xfce
> version numbers).
>
> Cut loose of the xfce umbilical, xffm was adopted by foo-projects,
> hosted at Stockholm University. The xffm.org domain was assigned and the
> web page at http://xffm.org/ was put on the line. The next release of
> Xffm would no longer follow the Xfce version numbers, but for
> consistency would not be rolled back.
>
> Xffm-4.5.0, which featured a new user interface (although the old nerdy
> treeview was still available) was released on 2006-05-24. This remained
> stable until 2009, when Intel gave me a multicore laptop to start doing
> multicore software.
>
> The new thread-safe thread-based design (code named "Rodent", for
> Francois' icon theme) required a rewrite of the Xffm code. For this
> rewrite several goals were set forth:
>  * Thread based, thread safe design
>  * Cleaner and simpler build process
>  * Faster and more powerful
>  * Unnerdification (this a bit surreal, coming from a nerd)
>
> As part of the unnerdification, the old treeview is gone. To keep it
> simple, the graphic part is as simple as the concept developed by the
> guys at Palo Alto (you know, the guys who first came up with the idea of
> rodent ---or mouse-- for a computer). Nothing more. Simple uncluttered
> graphics. Along side this graphic part is the keyboard. A place to issue
> commands. Graphic, but not for dummies.
>
> The first release of Rodent Alpha, (aka xffm-4.6.0) was in November
> 2010. And was presented at a conference at the University of Sonora. The
> second release was much more stable. This was Rodent Beta (aka
> xffm-4.6.2) in April 2011. The third release, code name Rodent Beta 2
> (aka xffm-4.6.4) will be in a few days from today.
>
> Beta 2 is much faster, much more stable and will have over 95%
> translation for the main non-English speaking Rodent user base (Germany,
> Spain, France, Ukraine and Russia), along with many other languages.
> This will be available very soon at the sourceforge download site.
>
> cheers!
>
> The rodent homepage is at http://rodent.xffm.org/
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