[Thunar-dev] Developing a new app for Xfce

[Stephan Arts]

On 1/25/07, Jani Monoses <jani.monoses at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Don't get me wrong about what i want to say.
File-roller is a great application, everybody knows about it, and it
is around long enough to have very little bugs left. It simply is
'the' standard Gtk archiver front-end.

But...
When we talk about performance and memory footprint, it follows Gnome
standards, not Xfce's.
These things seem second to features. Don't get me wrong, it is not a
bad app. but it does use twice the memory squeeze and xarchiver use.
Not to mention the speed.

This is something which does not result from depending on Gnome
libraries, it is a consequence of it's design. Not saying it is bad,
but it is different from how we would do it.

At this moment, file-roller still is the best app out there, simply
because it does the job and it is reliable. In the mean while, i will
continue to work on Squeeze, simply because i love to do it.

As a developer, most of us know an application does not evolve over
night, neither did file-roller nor any other piece of software (except
perhaps 'Hello World').

Just like any other man, i am re-inventing the wheel. And i think
(like every programmer does about his own creations) i've found the
way to make it round. I might succeed, or i won't. But in the end this
is not important, because i was having fun doing it.

Perhaps, what i am trying to say is... you are free to use
file-roller. Just as free as you are to use Xarchiver, Xarchive and
Squeeze. Each one is following their own path, and you can contribute
to this by filing feature-requests, reporting bugs, or translating the
app.
Some people contribute without knowing they do, they just use it.

All of these things are usefull, and help each of these applications
to become better. Just do not try to make one become the other.

But perhaps we stand on different sides of the code, development is
both journey as destination to me. Not the just the means to an end,
this is just a beautiful side-effect.

Stephan