C++ patch or .desktop file for desktop icons

[Daniel Ostrow]

<snip>
> You know, we might benefit from a GNOME style release timetable. At any  
> given time about two thirds of svn head is rock solid stability-wise, so I  
> suspect getting a release out every 6 months may not as hard as we think  
> it is.
</snip>

A large portion of the reasoning behind avoiding a standard release
schedule is guaranteeing that the individuals responsible for the
release are present and free at that time and have had enough time to
ensure the stability of their product. Take this from someone who
participates in Gentoo's release schedule every six months. The way to
intelligently get around this is to have a designated release
coordinator who doesn't have to worry about coding anything him or
herself that isn't implicitly release related (read tools needed to
perform the release). Oliver has done a very good job at this but he has
other responsibilities in making sure the code in major components is
good to go. With the way things are there is no real ability to preform
a standard release.

That being said with the exception of major releases (read changes to
the minor version, 4.0 -> 4.2 or 4.2 -> 4.4 and changes to major version
3.x -> 4.x) every point release should be just a roll-up of code in the
appropriate trunk or branch. Some culture change would also have to take
place to avoid pushing large changes into the release trees within say
45 days of a scheduled release and nothing that isn't a bugfix could go
into the tree during prerelease cycles. Also if a major release wasn't
ready by a 6 month cycle (like the 4.4 release for example) it would
have to wait. If this is something that the XFCE developers would want I
would be happy to provide help. While I may not be a great C coder I do
happen to understand the dynamics of release engineering and go through
the glorious headache already on a 6 month cycle.

--Dan