Architecture for XFce [was: icons for Settings Manager]

[Bernhard Walle]

Hello,

althought I'm not a XFce4 developer I want to say my opinion:

* Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer at unix-ag.uni-siegen.de> [2004-01-15 19:28]:
> > BTW, I know you prefer beautiful designs, but I'm not sure that will
> > ever work in a project like ours. Open source projects evolve in little
> > steps, by many different people. No-one gets things right the first
> > time. Grand total designs don't fit well with this method of
> > development.
> 
> My believe is that open source projects are indeed able to create "beautiful 
> designs". Imagine the man-power of the developers, I think discussing a 
> problem 1-2 months on IRC and mailinglists can led to a quite good design, 
> though its harder than the usual design process we are usually involved at work.

My opinion is that we have two advantages over commercial software
developement:

 * We have time. Nobody tells us that we must have finished the software
   in two weeks. XFce4 is the best example: The release date was July.
   Then it was not finished, the release was September (IIRC). No
   problem, we got a very stable and good 4.0 version and not a buggy
   "just finished" version.
 
 * We have no customer that says what we must do. We can program it the
   way we think it's the best. 


> Anyways, back to topic. I have collected some pieces of information and did a 
> basic design of a potential architecture for the system described earlier in 
> this thread (I called it "XFce all-in-wonder system" in lack of a good name 
> for now) and put it online here:
> 
> http://www.home.unix-ag.org/bmeurer/xfce/all-in-wonder.html
> 
> This is only a first-time-thoughts document, nothing special and nothing 
> ready-to-implement. There are some problems with the described approach and 
> there are a lot of things open for discussion.

the design is not bad, using is at base for the XFce desktop and related
applications would be good. For example 

But I don't like it as base for "normal" Linux desktop applications like
LinCVS. I want to be able to ran a application on KDE, Gnome, XFce and
others without a server from XFce. XFce is not KDE and it is not Gnome
which want(ed) to replace all existing applications with their own. I
use KDE programs and I use Gnome programs on XFce and I like it.

freedesktop.org is a big step for interoperability and I don't want to
give up interoperability. For XFce-related applications it is Ok, for
normal applications it is not. For example I could imagine a terminal
emulator for XFce integrated in the desktop but not a CVS program.



Gruß,
Bernhard

-- 
_________ http://www.bwalle.de _________________________________________________
"My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether
 you are content with your failure." 
         -- Abraham Lincoln