Goals for next Xfce releases

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Hello friends,

No this doesn't mean I want something from you ;-)

First of all, congratulations on the release of Xfce 4.4.0!
More people than ever before have contributed to this release and
I'd like to thank them all for making this the best Xfce ever.

Special mention goes to Benny, who almost single-handedly wrote a
file manager and supporting libraries that are an example of good
software design and bring a lot of new people to Xfce.

Another special mention from me goes to Nick, who, besides
creating our new website, also stepped up to help me out with panel
development. This is especially important since I have much less time
than I used to have and I don't see that changing soon.

Now, what I would like to do is formulate some goals and ideas that I
think would be good to work on for 4.4.x releases and eventually 4.6. Of
course, everyone will have their own priorities and their own amount of
free time to spend, but it does help if we can agree on some common
goals, if only to keep a sense of community and the feeling that we are
working on something together, as opposed to everyone hacking away in
their own corner.


Consolidate Platform
====================

- Cleanup and merge libraries:
  - compat, util, netk, gui, mcs, menu (?), ...

  Is there any package that wants to depend on libutil alone? I can't
  really think of any. In that case we could decide to have only one
  xfce-libs package. Maybe mcs should be separate?

- Settings daemon. No gui, use D-Bus to get/set values and listen for
  changes. Dialogs are started from .desktop files. This will make it easier
  to combine the interface for settings from different packages
  (keyboard shortcuts for instance), if we want that.
  Needs to depend on X for xsettings :( Or should that be separate?
 
  Or maybe we should just use GConf? It still depends on CORBA, I guess...

- Allow dependency on D-Bus for IPC. I wouldn't mind making this a hard
  dependency for Xfce, if it enables us to integrate our components
  better, which I think it will.

- New infrastructure?
  - There is a notification daemon, are there programs that would like
    to depend on this?
  - ...


Core Desktop
============

Session manager
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We probably want to keep an eye on the efforts to rewrite gnome-session.

Window manager
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For me xfwm4 does everything I want it to, so I've no ideas for 4.6.

Desktop manager
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Do we want a separate program to manage the background or should it be
part of thunar? How about the desktop menu?

Panel
~~~~~
I'm very interested to know what people are missing in the current panel
(besides CDE emulation ;-), so if you have wishes, preferably with an
example use case, this would be a good time to let us know.

Some ideas of my own:
- Transparency. I guess what people want is a translucent panel with
  opaque icons. This is hard. It means we have to write our own panel
  widgets, because every widget with a window needs to handle
  transparency in its expose handler. Ideally Gtk would handle this with
  a style property that could be set from a gtkrc file, but that is not
  the case now.

- Separate desktop files for launcher items. Someone mentioned this
  recently, I think it was benny. I'm not convinced this is necessary.
  We already use the same structure (Name,Icon,Exec,etc...), but the
  launcher items are not stand-alone programs, they are programs +
  options, so we can have 10 terminals with different arguments. Why
  would we want separate files for that?

- DND of (desktop) files directly to the panel. Yeah, that would be
  interesting. It's not easy, since there is no free space on the panel
  to drop anything on. It also requires launcher items to be special,
  but I don't really have a problem with that.

- Rewrite tasklist widget. Someone posted some interesting mockups that
  we could try to implement. Proper operation in vertical mode would be
  nice as well.

File manager
~~~~~~~~~~~~
No lack of ideas here, I believe. One from me: do we want to try and
integrate with Tracker for searching? It does sound more in line with
our philosophy than Beagle.


Apps/Utilities
==============

No real ideas from me here. I'll just list the apps we have now:

- Printing. I never use it, so I have no complaints ;-)

- Mixer/Volume. Works for me at home, but at work I have a USB headset
  and the mixer plugin always falls back to the soundcard, so I guess it
  could still be improved. It also uses GOB, which IMO sucks, sorry
  Danny.

- Appfinder. Should use new frap menu (libxfce4menu?). It's still an
  interesting alternative interface for finding and running applications,
  I think.

- Text editor. Mousepad is a cute little application, nothing to add
  from me.

- Terminal. I can't think of anything that is missing, but I'm sure some
  people can...

- Archiver. We have two, which seems a little redundant, but that is
  fine with me.

- CD Burning. I sometimes use this, and it has a nice interface. JF is
  doing a good job with it.

- Media Player. Works well enough for my needs.


One thing that crossed my mind when thinking about 4.6 was that I
couldn't think of anything that would make us change to 5.0 instead of
4.x. So, if we're not going to change it anyway, we could pull a Sun and
call the next version "Xfce 6". Might be good for marketing ;-)

I'm interested to hear what other people are thinking about the
future direction of Xfce.

cheers,

    Jasper