How to get to Xfce 4.4

[Brian J. Tarricone]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Damn you, Jasper.  I get up late, and tell myself I'm going to get my
ass out to the convention center, and then you send this really long
email that I really have to read and reply to ^_~.

On 1/8/2006 3:23 AM, Jasper Huijsmans wrote:

> * They work, but it would not be a bad idea if someone were to go over 
> them and see if we can clean things up a bit, now that we can depend on 
> gtk 2.6.

This would be nice, but I think the most we can do is deprecate stuff in
our libraries that have gtk 2.6+ equivalents, and then
search-and-replace in the apps to use gtk instead.  (Though that may be
what you were talking about.)

> * One thing that might be a good candidate to put in the libraries is 
> the menu spec handling. Currently xfdesktop uses different code from 
> xfce4-appfinder. Probably after 4.4, unless someone volunteers to do the 
> work.

Definitely post-4.4.

> * Similarly, the icon theme handling should be changed to use 
> GtkIconTheme instead of our own implementation. This is not trivial and 
> is probably something for after 4.4.

Ditto.

> Desktop
> 
> For me this includes xfce4-session, xfce-mcs-manager/plugin, xfce-utils, 
> xfwm4, xfdesktop, xfce4-panel, xfprint, xfce4-mixer, xfce4-appfinder and 
> I think xfce4-mailwatch-plugin (Brian, what is your opinion?).

I'd rather keep mailwatch out of the core for selfish reasons, but
realistically, it doesn't need many changes and there should be no
problem with tying it to Xfce's release schedule.  I've been meaning to
make some real releases, and it might be a good idea for me to do this
before we start freezing for 4.4 to knock some bugs out.

> * It would be great if the session manager could have a special dialog 
> for starting/stopping Xfce components, at least xfwm4, xfdesktop and 
> xfce4-panel. Again, this require someone to do the work. I'm not sure 
> how hard it would be.

I actually did something similar to this for xfdesktop only.  It's a bit
rough around the edges and I might remove it for 4.4.  Has anyone looked
at this?  It's in the desktop settings panel.

> * Some people have complained about the speed of xfrun and suggested the 
> use of gmrun (I think). We should check if we can't simply use gmrun 
> code. Needs someone to do the work; should be fairly easy.

Put it off.  No one has time for this, and no matter how "fairly easy"
we think it is, it really never is.

> * Brian said xfdesktop was slow to startup because of the menu 
> generation. Maybe that can still be improved before 4.4? Other than 
> that, it seems to work fine.

Nope, it's fine.  Menu generation (after the cache is built, anyway) is
negligible, and it's not that significant anymore even without a cache.
 The real bottleneck is backdrop handling.

> * The panel will need a new default configuration before 4.4, which 
> could require some translations as well. This is one of the last things 
> to decide though.

Are you planning on at least putting a stub MCS plugin in to handle
running the panel prefs from the settings manager?  It's notably missing.

> * The trigger launcher and xfce4-eyes-plugin should be moved to the 
> goodies project, IMO.

Agree.  Now that xfce4-tips is in xfce4-session, can we please just
remove xfce4-toys completely?

> Applications
> 
> * There are a number of application that should release along with the 
> desktop. Definitely that includes Orage, xffm and hopefully thunar.
> 
> * Other possibilities are xfmedia, mousepad and xfburn, but they don't 
> necessarily have to be released at the same time as the desktop.

No, they don't need to release at the same time, but it might be nice
for marketing reasons to try to release them all with 4.4.0.  I *think*
I can have an xfmedia release I'm comfortable calling 1.0 in time for
4.4.0 if I work my ass off.

> It would be nice to have a small team to take care of the maintainance 
> of the site, hopefully together with Francois. Someone probably needs to 
> have a look at what kind of information we have to show and how this can 
> best be presented.

I'd be interested in this, but I feel like I'd be overcommitting myself.

> Other Xfce Projects
> ===================
> 
> I'd like to see Xfce develop further towards a small desktop project 
> with a number of independent subprojects that provide additional 
> functionality. It should be easy to find links to these projects on 
> xfce.org.
> 
> www.xfce.org
> - i18n.xfce.org
> - goodies.xfce.org
> - xffm.xfce.org
> - thunar.xfce.org
> - orage.xfce.org    | maybe some smaller applications could better
> - mousepad.xfce.org | be part of goodies.xfce.org or even
> - xfburn.xfce.org   | applications.xfce.org
> - xfmedia.xfce.org
> - forum.xfce.org
> - wiki.xfce.org
> - xfce-look.org
> - bugzilla.xfce.org
>  
> Ok, now, all of this won't happen without people actually taking time to 
> work on it. And this has always been our problem :(

For now it's not a big deal.  Most of these already exist, and for those
that aren't .xfce.org, we can just add redirects for now.  It would also
be cool to point artwork.xfce.org (or something similar) to xfce-look.org.

> Maybe it would be nice if all developers would reply to this mail with a 
> indication of what they plan to do before 4.4.

This is the stuff I want to do and I think I can actually get done:

* xfdesktop: clean up window icon code, hunt down and fix remaining bugs
(most of them cosmetic at this point).  possibly remove the start/stop
functionality in the MCS plugin if it's not prod-worthy.
* mailwatch: do new screenshots, clean up the documentation, do a 0.x
release before 4.4.0.
* xfmedia: finish code reorg, which should lead to a coherent plugin
API.  this will take a lot of time.  fix bugs introduced in reorg.  add
a few minor features.  have 1.0 ready for xfce 4.4.0.
* website: provide support to others who are working on revamping the
website.  i don't have time to take a lead on this.

	-brian

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFDwUwQ6XyW6VEeAnsRAlxUAKCvVrY8x7KJ2lZ7Cq8yYHzBE6ok2ACfcFeH
XRrw34GwYJ25geJpGRbhbOs=
=8UnS
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----