Xfce 4.1 alpha release?

[Benedikt Meurer]

Olivier wrote:
> Benny,
> 
> On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 23:42, Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> 
>>The problem is that we put a lot of work in multiscreen support and if we now 
>>decide to release w/ the current mcs-manager it wasn't worth the effort and 
>>atleast I would not feel comfortable with the 4.2 release. We should really 
>>not release 4.2 like this. Come on Olivier, its really worth to delay the 
>>release date for one month. We get a better 4.2 for just one month.
> 
> 
> It would be a lot simpler to change the mcs manager so that it manages
> all screens and duplicate the values on all screens. When mapping a
> setting dialog on demand, mcs manager would simply move the window to
> the current screen.
> 
> This way, minimal change in applications' code, no API change, no
> translation change, etc. I guess I can come up quickly with an
> implementation if needed.

Rather hacky and besides that it would not solve the problem. Take the display 
plugin for an example: If you put the resolution setting on both screens and 
imagine your two screens have different graphic cards with different possible 
resolutions, then xfce-mcs-manager will crash with an X error while trying to 
set the resolution of the second screen. Ok, we could ignore those X errors, 
but then again, people will wonder why their settings aren't applied correctly 
and thats more of a really dirty hack than something one would want to release 
as stable.

Theres another important point to consider: We will have to break the 
mcs-manager, sooner or later, and replace it. Currently we have no 3rd party 
applications that make use of the mcs-manager (e.g. install mcs plugins), so 
the problems caused by a mcs manager change are minimal. If we now release 4.2 
with the current mcs-manager, vendors/people could decide that they want to 
provide additional mcs plugins, and we will cause problems for them when we 
break the mcs-manager with 4.4.

And another important point: There'll be no easy way to share code between the 
4.2 and the 4.4 branch regarding mcs plugins.

And of course the marketing point: If we hack around the problem, we would 
probably have to say "Xfce 4.2 supports multi-screen (but it'll probably b0rk 
your settings, so please wait another year for 4.4)". We already told people 
that multihead support had to wait for 4.2, they will loose trust in Xfce if 
we now tell them that they may have to wait for 4.4.

> Cheers,
> Olivier.

Benedikt

-- 
NetBSD Operating system:                       http://www.NetBSD.org/
pkgsrc "Work in progress":                  http://pkgsrc-wip.sf.net/
XFce desktop environment:                        http://www.xfce.org/
German Unix-AG Association:                   http://www.unix-ag.org/
os-cillation:                             http://www.os-cillation.de/

OpenPGP Key: http://www.home.unix-ag.org/bmeurer/#gpg