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

[Benedikt Meurer]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:
>>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.

On a related note: I'm working on a unified preferences API (primarily
for Thunar right now), which abstracts the API from the backend and
provides get/set/notify support based on GObject, and can be used from
both C programs/libraries, as well as language bindings. It depends
solely on glib-2.0 (and whatever the backends need, currently
libxfce4util-1.0 for the so far hardcoded rc file backend). The most
important thing to note is the client side schema support through
GObject properties, which provides the applications with a type-safe API
to probably untyped backends (like an rc file).

I uploaded a snapshot here:

http://xfce.org/~benny/tmp/opax-0.0.1svn-r0112.tar.bz2

The whole thing is far from being finished. But for Thunar 1.0, there'll
be a final version ready.

Still, I doubt that we will be able to smoothly replace libxfce4mcs for
Xfce 4.4. I think of this as a goal for 4.6 and/or 5.0.

Benedikt