Squeeze and Xarchiver

Brian J. Tarricone bjt23 at cornell.edu
Mon Jan 29 22:02:11 CET 2007


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Jean-Philippe Guillemin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Don't get me wrong, I'm just wondering why two developers from the same 
> meta-project (let's call XFCE like this) are working on independent 
> implementations of an archive manager ?

Because they want to?

> It seems strange, do you really disagree about the whole design ?

- From hearing them both talk about it, yes, it appears they do.

> As far as I know, Giuseppe's Xarchiver does the job, why not working 
> together to improve Xarchiver instead of reinventing the wheel. Nothing 
> bad about forking/reinventing in the general case : there are many Linux 
> distributions with same goals, and challenging is usually a source of 
> improvements - it just seems strange within the same meta-project.

Who are you (or I, or anyone else) to tell people what to do with their
free time?  If someone thinks they have a better way to do something,
and that the existing ways can't be modified well to support their way
of thinking, I think it's perfectly reasonable to start over from scratch.

> Imho, Squeeze will probably be better than Xarchiver (design errors 
> won't be reproduced, shared code will be improved, ...) , or it won't 
> last , so why not merging efforts ?

Because Guiseppe still wants Xarchiver to be a desktop-neutral
integrated archive manager, Stephan wants to make his more Xfce-ish, and
also wants to separate the actual archiving tasks from the GUI into a
library.  Likely Squeeze will end up being Xfce's "official" (whatever
that means) archiver, but it would be pretty mean to just kick Giuseppe
and Xarchiver out and ask him to find different project hosting,
especially after we invited him here!  Besides, Xarchiver is a great
piece of software that we're happy to host.

Note that, as of 4.4.0, neither archiver is ready to be considered a
part of the Xfce release.

	-brian

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