new backdrop settings dialog

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Olivier Fourdan wrote:

>The problem I see with such a dialog is the time required to scale down 
>all backdrops.
>  
>
i tend to agree with that.  an option to mitigate that would be to first 
pre-fill the list with the names of the files, then, in another thread, 
rescale each image and stick them in there as they are generated.  
regardless, i don't think there's a need for image previews for anything 
but maybe the image list.  plus perhaps a preview of the currently 
selected image (in single image mode).  otherwise, the preview pane in 
the file selection dialog is fine.

>When I see that it takes several (maybe 15-20 sec.) seconds to start
>xfdesktop now on P4 @2.6GHz, because of the menu icons, I wonder if that
>is  really in line with the initial goals of xfce.
>  
>
whoa!  i can't imagine it taking that long.  do you really have that 
many menu items, or that many .desktop files in 
/usr/share/applications?  on my system (athlon 1.33ghz), it takes no 
more than 2 or 3 seconds to start under normal conditions.  if the 
system is loaded (say a compile running in the background, this can 
balloon up to 6 or 7 seconds, but that's the most i'd ever experienced.  
if it's really taking that long for you, i'd like to try to figure out 
why and fix it.  granted i'm sure some of my fast startup times are due 
to the fact that, since i tend to kill it and restart it often while i'm 
working on it, there's some caching going on.  but still, my 
average-case is around 0.5 to 0.75 seconds.  the 3-second figure was a 
worst-case on an unloaded (assumingly) uncached system, which i think is 
reasonable when you consider that most users will start xfdesktop with 
their session and leave it.  at any rate, it's possible to disable both 
the icons and the autogenerated menu, so the speed should be comparable 
to what it was before if you don't mind the tradeoff.

    -brian