Goals for next Xfce releases

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hey,

On Sun, 28 Jan 2007 14:21:14 +0100, Benedikt Meurer wrote:

> Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
> > Hello friends,
>
> Hey Jasper,
>
> > - 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?
>
> I'd suggest to keep the libraries we have as they are for now...

I never liked those huge library tarballs from KDE, so I vote against
merging everything into one single library. Cleaning up always sounds
like a good idea, though.

> > - 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.
>
> Definitely. Atleast for exo/thunar/terminal D-Bus will be a harddep
> now that 1.0 is available. The only reason why D-Bus was optional so
> far was the lack of the 1.0 release and the not-yet-frozen API.

I'm fine with this. Relying on D-Bus should give us plenty of
opportunities to make our components work together in a smart way.

> > Desktop manager
> > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> > Do we want a separate program to manage the background or should it
> > be part of thunar? How about the desktop menu?
>
> Thunar will be able to do that. Dunno if xfdesktop should still be
> around for people that don't use thunar.

Difficult question IMHO. I think it's better to only have one program
for letting the desktop look nice. Otherwise, users might be confused
due to differences in desktop usage between xfdesktop and Thunar.

> ...the menu is the really interesting thing. Jannis already did some
> work on this. It'd be really nice if 4.6 would provide a fully
> standard compliant and easy to use menu implementation.

Development has gone quite far already, so there should be no problem
in shipping this implementation with Xfce 4.6.

> IMHO this stuff should be moved to the panel to avoid too many
> modules. Afterall this is primarily relevant for the panel. We can
> later put that stuff into libxfce4util/libexo if desired.

Do you mean the menu implementation? I'm not sure putting it into the
panel would be a good idea, as some other programs (like Thunar and the
appfinder) will make use of it as well.

> > - Appfinder. Should use new frap menu (libxfce4menu?). It's still an
> >   interesting alternative interface for finding and running
> > applications, I think.
>
> See the xfce4-appbrowser I posted some time ago. Another approach
> would be to use the Novell Appfinder like interface as suggested in
> the same thread.

With us probably going for Gtk+ 2.10, there will be no GtkCanvas
available. There are ways to implement a Novell-like interface without,
of course. Anyway, unless we know that there will be time to work this
out, we can still go for the non-headache solution and write a slightly
enhanced version of the appbrowser you've posted.

Regards,
  Jannis
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