xfce roadmap

[daniele favara]

 would say, first of all, thanks for developing the cool xfce DM.

i choose xfce4 as the dm of my project for many reasons, and mainly
because it's just perfect for a live cd.

Now that the "core" stuff is almost done i would start working to make
the whole livecd more user friendly as possible, but i need to know
what to put on my todo list and with what priority.

1) desktop icons

Someone told me that xfce4 devels don't like them, i personally don't
need them but an user that boot for the first time in xfce4 will be
lost i think.

I don't like for example the kde and gnome idea of using the Desktop
as the user home ... that's windows i think :). GNU/Linux has $HOME.
So with desktop icons i don't mean $HOME/Desktop stuff, and i don't
mean nether application icons ... there is the menu, even if in some
cases it can be useful to have them.

I mean desktop icons for devices.

In my project i was using an ivman plugin that when a new device is
plugged (firewire|usb|camera for ex.) a new icon is added to the root
window, that's done using an hacked xtdesktop.

Then i found the cool notification-daemon, that can even show messages
communicating with hal and d-bus.

So i  wrote a notify.py script to use with ivman.

- the user plugs the device
- hal find it
- ivam acts and run:
 - ivmanicons (to draw the desktop icon)
 - notify.py (to notify to user what's happening )
    -  popup message saying a new dev has been plugged + mount point
    -  thunar launched on mount point

then i discovered hal-device-manager has most of the code neded to
write a python volume manager ... and i did it.

i integrated notify.py and i'll start soon to let the user to define
the rules from an xml file as udev (and ivman)  , at the moment the
rules and actions are hard coded.

As the desktop icons are an important point here i would know if xfce
will draw them and how. If it will i'll stop working on that hacked
xtdesktop and i'll concentrate on other stuff.

2) Xfedesktop and the root window

i really love xfce4 but let me say ... I hate xfdesktop, esetroot is a
small app and can control the root window much better.

What are your plans about this ?

3) Thunar

the best fm manager i've ever tried out, and it's still under development.
few Questions about thunar:

- will it integrate a CTRL+/ to browse the paths as rox ?
- will it integrate a CTRL+! to run apps as rox ?
- will it (u)mount even devices ? and will it even p(u)mount ?

4) Xfmedia

for a volume manager it would be really nice to play directly a dvd or
audio-cd with xfmedia, i didn't find any option to do this.

- will it be possible ?


my project is really new, but i've already had some good results, i
would continue using xfce4 as dm, to see it improving and help where i
can.

these are some links ... i'm waiting that ibiblio sets up the VHOST,
and i'm remaking the whole site:

http://dsslive.org [at the moment not working]
http://dss.berlios.de/flat/ [the old one]
http://www.dsslive.org.test.ibiblio.org/mediawiki/ [the new one]

and here a screenshot:

http://www.dsslive.org.test.ibiblio.org/mediawiki/images/Dsslive-desktop.png


ciao

df