4.4 ETA?

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Hi Jani,

Jani Monoses schreef:
...
> 
> - what is the status of xfce feature-freeze-wise as I understand the
> code itself is still devel. Anything else planned for panel besides
> stabilization and porting of existing plugins? Anything planned for
> xfce-session?

The panel is unfortunately not finished at all. It is very hard to 
predict how much will change. What we have now is a basic framework and 
a plugin API that should remain mostly stable.

The user interface on the other hand is still very new. It's only the 
second or third try and I expect user testing will reveal quite some 
problems.

It does work more or less, so if we decide it is good enough as it is, 
things could stabilize fairly quickly. I'm not at all sure I'm happy 
with the way it is now, though. Alternative suggestions are still 
welcome (preferably with mockups and/or detailed description of most 
options ;-).

> 
> I hope you take this just as a gentle nudge and not an annoying attempt
> at making you reveal your most secret devel plans :)  But since most of
> the development - besides thunar maybe - goes on in relative quiet, it
> is not easy to figure out from just svn commits what stage you're at and
> how to best integrate this with the clearer schedule I need for ubuntu.
> 

;-)

Yeah, this is a bit of a 'problem' with Xfce. Basically, we don't know. 
There is no plan. Each developer has some ideas, usually not very 
definite, and limited time to work on things. Plans also change as we go 
along, which makes it even more difficult to make predictions.

As an example my 'plan' for the panel for 4.4 was to turn the panel 
components into proper gtk widgets, to have a library with a proper API 
for plugin writers and to support out-of-process plugins. Oh, and to 
support DND to move items.

I have that now, but the required changes to the user interface, I make 
up as I go along. How much time this will take, I have no idea.

I believe most of us work like this, except probably benny ;-)

Anyway, I would certainly hope we can make a release before April, but, 
as Brian said, not I'm not sure how much earlier than that...

If you use the latest library version is should probably be possible to 
mix and match older and newer versions of Xfce components.

I guess that didn't help you much, did it?

	Jasper