new dev branch stuff

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Benedikt Meurer wrote:

> My personal vision for Xfce was always to make it
>
>  (a) "just work"
>  (b) "easy to use"
>  (c) "lightweight"
>  (d) "advanced" (this is least important, IMHO)
>
> 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!).

the problem that i see is that a+b and d can be difficult to do at the 
same time.  of course i guess this depends on what you mean by 
"advanced".  if you mean that it's very flexible in that each user has a 
host of options and can configure it to their taste, then it's somewhat 
hard to make that "easy to use" (unless you expect the "must be easy to 
use" users to not configure it really, and then it just becomes a matter 
of sane defaults).  making something advanced in the sense of having 
more configuration options is sometimes mutually exclusive with being 
lightweight (though ultra-agreesive modularity and use of 
runtime-loadable shared objects helps a lot here, though with a minor 
perf penalty).

i dunno - i'm not sure where i'm going with this - i guess i don't 
really understand exactly what you mean by these 4 criteria, and how you 
feel they relate to and interact with each other.

> 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).

bottom line: all software tends to grow in size as time goes on.  it's 
inevitable.  all we can do is try to make it as modular and 
well-designed as possible so that the size increase is manageable and 
doesn't affect performance and memory footprint (too much).

    -b