[project-proposal] xfce4ring

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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Robin Haswell wrote:

> From a user's point of view, I find that picking up my settings and
> taking them to a new computer is extremely tiresome, as there are too
> many folders to remember to zip up.

$ tar cvjf xfce-config.tar.bz2 ~/.config/xfce4 ~/.cache/sessions \
    ~/.config/xfce4-session/

Was that so hard?  Put it in a script and you never have to remember it
again.  Granted, that last directory is IMHO pretty lame.  (See
http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386)

> XFCE is also a PITA as it writes its
> current configuration on shutdown, so I can't copy my settings while
> XFCE is running. This isn't a biggie for me (I write all my code with
> vim), but it is annoying because I always forget to kill X beforehand,

That's just plain incorrect.

All the MCS settings panels write their config when the dialog box is
closed (any that don't should have a bug filed against them).

The panel saves its plugin setup within 10 seconds of adding or removing
a plugin, and most (sane) plugins save their config immediately when
it's changed (again, if not, file a bug against that plugin).

(Note that the 4.2.x panel does wait to write its settings, to avoid
allowing a poorly-written panel plugin to crash the panel, and then not
allow it to start again at all.  I think Jasper changed this in 4.2 as
well to save the  panel layout some 10 seconds after adding a new
plugin, though, so this is pretty much instantaneous for all reasonable
purposes.)

Perhaps you're talking about the session manager saving the session?
Not much you can do about that.  Well, unless we had an
xfce4-session-save command, but that's really a teeny tiny part of "xfce
settings", so I fail to see how you could be so annoyed about that one
tiny little thing.

I'm not entirely sure why you need to copy your settings around that
often anyway.

> Anyway, back on-topic, a centralised location for storing everything
> would be great. But... wasn't that supposed to be gconf?

If gconf weren't an utter mess, perhaps we'd use it.  Its dependencies
are pretty ugly too (orbit being the most egregiously annoying of them).
 Even the gnome folks want to ditch it when a suitable replacement comes
around.

	-brian

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