[Thunar-dev] Developing a new app for Xfce

[Jani Monoses]

> tutorial on what each lib provide, where to start looking, etc. For 
> games, as you people have pointed, there should be little use for xfce 
> libs, but for other apps in general, we could not be reinventing the 
> wheel....
> For example, a friend of mine (Alexandre Moreira, also on the list) is 
> working on a "pluggable text editor", and he probably could make good 
> use of some things already on the xfce libs...

To me starting from the idea of making an app by using Xfce libs looks 
like a solution in search of a problem. Why not find out what Xfce users
miss from a typical Xfce desktop, either because there is no such app at 
all (unlikely) or it does not fit well with Xfce because it is not as 
light (used KDE/GNOME technology, written in java/mono etc).

Then look if any of those, and the likeliest candidates are GNOME apps 
could use some patching to make them lighter which would then benefit 
both desktop users. There is little value in starting from scratch and 
making yet another app, users nowadays are confused enough by the 
variety of apps in many areas due to me-too attitudes which lead to 
half-finished and unmaintained projects. Honestly who needs yet another 
text editor, IM client, cd burner and the list could go on. There is a 
lot of value in writing them _for the developer_ but to users it's not 
valuable unless it really comes out great.

Xfce is thunar, xfdesktop, panel, session and xfwm. These were written 
from scratch are are significantly different from their GNOME 
counterparts. Other projects under the xfce umbrella are not nearly as 
essential and defining as these, and users and distro makers often 
replace them with others.

For example I was planning to put gnome-volume-manager into Xubuntu 
after slimming it of gnome deps. Now with thunar-volman which is lighter 
and integrates better with Xfce there's no need, but this is an 
exception to the rule.

Similarly if Xfce devs worked together with file-roller upstream to have 
it build with --disable-gnome,there could have been a lighter but mature 
archiver for Xfce. Instead we now have two beta quality ones with code 
and UI still in flux.

Jani