CVS update of xfbugs^H^H^H^H^H^Hxfce4

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Hello CVS users,

Until now the name xfce has always been almost a synonym for stability
and speed. This will no longer be true. As of today xfce will lose its
good name and forever spend its existence in a dark corner of the linux
universe accompanied only by fellow outcasts like GNOME 0.99 and early
revisions of Mozilla.

What happened you ask? Well, that's easy, I had a nice little idea ...
You all must be familiar with this story. I had this nice little idea
that panel items should all have the same interface, i.e. unify
traditional icons and dynamic modules. And then I thought this
interface should support changing items on the panel on the fly and
well naturally in that case menu items should also be changeable in
place using instant-apply dialogs. And ... 

Anyway before I knew it I was in over my head rewriting the internals of
the panel. There's more. You can now choose the popup button position
for all sizes (left|right|top|bottom, you made me do this Botsie!). I
rearranged the global settings in three tabs. and probably something
else I forgot. Ah, yes you can choose whether you want the panel on top
of other windows or not.

And then there are the bugs. I implemented lots of bugs to scare off
possible early adopters and casual CVS users. See if you can find them
;-)

Be warned that the xml file format has changed. This is a consequence
of the change to panel control structures instead of items and
modules. Here is a recipe to update your file manually if you don't
want to lose your settings:

- replace all occurrences of 'Module' with 'Control' (without the
  quotes)

- replace occurrances of <Item>...</Item> that are not inside
  <Popup>...</Popup> tags (these are the menu items), with 
  <Control id="-2">...</Control>

You will lose mailcheck settings as they will now be incorporated into
the main xml file. 

This revision of xfce4 is a bit flaky still. For instance for me it
often crashes on exit (not a really big problem, but a bug nonetheless).
I still dont have much time to work on it, so feel free to fix bugs in
CVS. For this reason also I didn't make a snapshot available on
sourceforge yet.

I also made some sort of TODO list a while ago of features I thought
would be nice to implement for 4.0. I'll list the file here since this
already is a long e-mail anyway. Note that when I say Done this means I
added the feature, not that it's finished (read the above about bugs
;-). Any thoughts?


Major features for 4.0
======================
* port clock widget                     In progress (zeDek)
* unify panel controls                  Done
  (make everything a module)
* improve module configuration          
  - add chosen module to panel          Done
  - direct-apply options                Done
  - save config in main file            Done
    (pass xmlNodePtr to module)
* improve global configuration          
  - add stay-on-top option              Done
  - split up dialog                     In progress
  - port to new xfce-wide system        
* write API docs for plugin writers
* write user docs
* provide good default configuration
* allow different positions for 
  popup button in all sizes             Done

Nice to have for 4.0
====================
* more themes: Night, KDE, Next, WindowsXP, BeOS, ...
  (not too many released with xfce4; < 10)
* volume control plugin

Possible future features (after 4.0)
====================================
* optional pager instead of desktop buttons
* swallow apps
* hide popup buttons
* 'Eugenia'-like design with vertical move
  handles and variable size plugins

Have fun,
	Jasper

-- 
IRC channel: #xfce on irc.openprojects.net