Xfce 4.1 alpha release?

[Eduard Roccatello]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 14:30:25 +0200
Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer at unix-ag.uni-siegen.de> wrote:

> You said you're not happy with the current status of Xfce, I'm
> neither. Thats why I'm bugging you with this. I think it doesn't
> matter when we release 4.2. I think its more important that we are
> happy with what we release.
>
I think Benny is right. We should wait at least for a couple of month
before freezing the 4.2 branch. I prefer to wait and get a fast and good
DE than having a slow one now.

> You're right, we kinda lost the direction during the last months and
> we had quite different opinions on where we want to go. Xfce starts up
> too slow, which is most notably caused by the session manager (esp.
> the current splash theme implementation) and the menu parsing code
Startup is now quite slow. I like xfce 'cause it is fast and
lightweight and i know a BIG_NUM of people using it for this.
Having a slow startup would mean less users ;-(

So what to do?
Xfdesktop is slow cause it index all .desktop files every time something
change (i think Brian could explain better than me :-). Is it really an
useful thing? Why don't we cache the menu on the first run and let
regenerate it only when there are big changes (or user request)?
xfce-session is slowing up the startup cause it wait for all apps to get
up and then it show the desktop. If i've psi (kde related) opened when
i've closed X the startup is really slow.
Is there a way to avoid to lock up X? Just load xfce stuff and show up X
and then load the session? These are only ideas but we need to resolve
this things.

> IMHO. But we should keep in mind that Xfce is not GNOME, we don't get
> paid for our work on Xfce. We all have jobs. We spent our freetime
> developing for Xfce, because its fun. We cannot keep up with GNOME's
> release cycles.
I agree but keep in mind that we probably have the best DE
(performance/cost ratio) and we must keep it the best :-)

> It'd be nice if you could explain were you want Xfce to go in the
> future.
>
I think a roadmap will be really useful :-)

-- 
Eduard Roccatello
eduard (at) xfce (dot) org