new dev branch stuff

[Jasper Huijsmans]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 03:04:21PM +0100, Benedikt Meurer wrote:
...
> 
>  (a) "just work"
>  (b) "easy to use"
>  (c) "lightweight"
>  (d) "advanced" (this is least important, IMHO)
> 

Well, these are everyone's goal, even GNOME and KDE. But accents will be
different. Lightweight is probably the most distinguishing goal for Xfce
compared to the others.

> Atleast the first 3 points imply that the core is small and easy to 
> maintain, which isn't the case currently (I think I say that, as I was 
> the one that tried to release the beast!).
> 

Please, try to make suggestions for change, especially since you have
first-hand experience with the release.

> With all the recent changes and ideas popping up, I thought it was time 
> to ask if we still have a goal, or if we simply follow the tradition of 
> KDE and Gnome (which would basicly mean for me, to re-think if its 
> really worth to spend my spare time on Xfce).
> 

We aren't doing that bad, are we? Mainly because of the limited time available
to all of us, we have focused only on the core applications. I agree that this
is a good time to step back and think about how we really want Xfce to work
and to think of the best way to get there.

I'm not sure what you mean by following the tradition of GNOME and KDE.
Improving interoperability with them is an important part of your (a) and (b)
and because they have several orders of magnitude more developers we will
surely end up following their lead more often than not. We also need them to
supply applications that can be used seamlessly together with Xfce.

So, what exactly can we do to differentiate ourselves from GNOME/KDE,
specifically in being light-weight?

* Less integration: separate programs that work well together and can be
  removed when not wanted.
  
* Less functionality: we have to make decission on how we want Xfce to work
  and not add too many fancy feature and options. This is very hard to get
  right.
  
* Less dependencies: only gtk and libxml2. The trend of putting more and more
  things in gtk from GNOME may be beneficial for us, or not. On one hand it
  allows us to use their work, on the other it makes it less favorable for us
  to implement something differently (linking to both implementations).

So, by all means let's discuss what we want for Xfce and more importantly how
we are going to get there.

Maybe we need more process ('rules')? More coordination? Something else? Let's
discuss this properly.

	Jasper