Xfce 4.4BETA1

[sofar]

On Sun, 26 Mar 2006 17:11:09 +0100, Robin Haswell <rob at digital-crocus.com> wrote:
> Sorry, instead of 4.4 I meant "latest SVN" - 4.3, or whatever that is.
> Anyway, I don't know what you want from XFCE but if you want it to be
> more popular you should consider Ubuntu as "maybe a bit more relevant
> than irrelevant", as XFCE is perfectly poised in Ubuntuland with
> Xubuntu. Semi-geeks who want Linux that "just works" without being
> patronised by GNOME or brain-fried by KDE are the perfect audience for
> an XFCE desktop - and Ubuntu has shedloads of them.

You don't get it - Xfce's release schedule is not influenced by other people's release schedules - no discussion. If Xfce 4.4 is not ready then it will not be released. You may think that XXX is sooooo important but think about this:

- when we released 4.0, 4.2 etc was it really just as important? How about 2 years from now?
- are you sure that favoring one distro will really help?
- do you think that if we schedule releases when we are not ready will improve quality?
- if we release at the wrong time do we not disappoint users in the quality?
- what about non-linux'es ? We aim to be portable - should we then also just drop solaris/bsd/irix ?

Ubuntu is nice, and certainly (as any other distro that advertises Xfce, such as almost _all_ of them) brings a lot of eyes towards Xfce. But in the decision process does not play a role - and that is not to make Ubuntu irrelevant at all, but just *totally* irrelevant to the release schedule - which was the context that you were discussing it in.

Here is what really matters to the release schedule:

- that the developers have extra time to make releases
- that everyone is ready
- that noone has showstoppers
- that new features are solidly tested
- that someone manages it all and does the hard work
etc.

As you can see, Ubuntu is not a part of this list. Neither is Lunar-Linux or Gentoo, nor debian, nor RedHat or Fedora etc. 

Auke