What are the objectives for Xfce 4.4?

[Maarten Boekhold]

Hi All,

One of the design goals I would like to see is a rework of the various 
plugin interfaces. At the moment, the plugin interfaces do not work 
correctly/completely on Cygwin, and due to Windows limitations they 
cannot be made to work if we stick to the current design.

Some time ago I had a brief discussion with Jasper, and the idea came up 
to populate a v-table in the application. This v-table would contain 
pointers to all functions & variables inside the application that can be 
called/used by the plugin. The v-table is passed to the module when the 
module is loaded. Xffm uses something like this already (xfce4_combo, 
xfce4_mime_icons etc.), although it does this the other way around (eg 
it creates a v-table of functions in the plugin that xffm can call).

I'll have to see how much time I can allocate to help out on this. If we 
can come up with a nice project plan for this, the next release date 
isn't too aggressive and we accept a temporary breakage of Xfce (we'll 
need to break the existing plugin interfaces for a while until 
everything has settled down), I might even be able to work on this...

As a very quick background: on windows you cannot have a plugin 
reference a *variable* which is defined in the application that loads 
the module (but it can reference a function).

Maarten

Biju Chacko wrote:
> Basically, we need to set some clear objectives. These objectives need 
> to be achievable, and there should be a rough idea of how much work it's 
> gonna take. We should decide which objectives should be delivered with 
> which release.