new dev branch stuff

[Brian J. Tarricone]

hi all,

so HEAD is open again for major b0rkage.  i'd like to discuss a couple 
things.  let the flamewar begin.

1) what's our new gtk target for xfce 4.4?  gtk 2.4?

2) are we going to officially depend on d-bus?  i'd like to add 
command-line remote control support to xfdesktop, and i really don't 
feel like doing something lame like a named pipe or unix socket.  yes, i 
know the d-bus API isn't finalised, and i know the glib bindings aren't 
completely finished.  benny has more expertise in this area, so i'd be 
interested in hearing his opinion.  methinks that the only thing that 
*really* matters is that the wire protocol is frozen.  if the API isn't 
frozen, we may have to fudge with some #ifdefs, but hopefully it'll be 
frozen by the time 4.4.0 goes gold.

3) autogenerated files in CVS.  they are a pain.  i want to remove 
them.  jasper already has for the panel.  jasper is smart.  jasper has a 
ph.d.  therefore we should all do as jasper does.  (am i embarassing you 
yet?)

(when i say "we", i mean "xfce devs")
pros for removing:
a) we don't have to deal with making sure they're always updated in CVS.
b) we don't have to deal with conflicts when we run autogen locally and 
later cvs update only to find that someone has since run autogen and 
committed changes to all the Makefile.ins.
c) we don't have to deal with problematic libtool versions on random 
people's machines causing libraries to lose their .so suffixes.

cons against removing:
a) fewer users may use CVS, thus less testing as we go along.
b) users need to have the autotools installed.
c) users may have problems with their autotools, and complain when it's 
not our fault.

now, for the cons, i don't think they're a big deal:
a) well, ok.  this one might be a big deal.  but intuition seems to 
suggest that the users that will jump the extra hurdle to keep using CVS 
are the ones that give the most useful feedback anyway.  we can get more 
people using CVS by either (or both) generating CVS snapshots every 
night, or by doing a dev release every month or so.
b) so what?  for most users that amounts to a few simple apt or rpm or 
yum or emerge or lin or whatever commands.
c) well, that already happens anyway, e.g., pro #3.

that's all for now.

    -brian