[Xfce4-commits] r17207 - libxfcegui4/trunk/libxfcegui4

[Benedikt Meurer]

Jeff Franks wrote:
> It would be hard for me to maintain code I didn't write and are 
> unfamiliar with, without going through it one line at a time... which 
> doesn't sound like much fun. And of course, those who currently write 
> and maintian the code would have to continue to do so.
> 
> As a starting point what I envisage I could do... is say... work on the 
> libraries. You, Brian and concerned others could look at libxfce4mcs, 
> libxfce4util and libxfcegui4 and make up a list of TODO's, such as code 
> to remove, change or fix. I could then work on all the TODO's... like a 
> slave. The Xfce5 SVN could be started off with something like a 
> xfce5libs module that has libxfce5mcs, libxfce5utils and libxfce5gui 
> submodules, each with its own configure.ac file etc. Once that was 
> working we could see what needed to be done next... perhaps setting up 
> other xfce5 modules like xfce5base, xfce5core or some other name, and 
> later maybe modules like xfce5apps, xfce5goodies etc. And possibly 
> assist removing old code from xfce4 apps to get them to compile on 
> xfce5. You, Brian and concerned others could make all the decisions, I 
> could work on implementing them.

While talking about libxfce4mcs: There's another reaons to wait with the
5.0 break. It'd be really, really nice if we could drop the whole MCS
system in favour of a new standard configuration system, which doesn't
suffer from the well-known XSETTINGS problems.

Concerning xfce5libs: I'm not sure if that's a good idea. It'd be better
to split libxfcegui4, and create a sepearte libnetk (which is only used
by the window manager and the panel) and probably merge some of the
useful widgets to libexo. There are a lot of apps out there, that don't
need libxfcegui4 at all, but need libxfce4util (for resource lookup, rc
files, desktop files, or whatever).

So, I strongly vote to do the 5.0 break after 4.4 or 4.6 is released.

What can (and should be) done is the xfce4goodies part. It'd be really
nice to group the goodies into one or several (by category) modules.
That'd ease packaging a lot.

> Regards,
> Jeff.

Benedikt