Squeeze and Xarchiver

[Auke Kok]

Jean-Philippe Guillemin wrote:
> 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 ?
> 
> It seems strange, do you really disagree about the whole design ?
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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 ?

nothing wrong with a fork once in a while.

good reasons to fork were:

* squeeze aims towards xfce
* provide archive management layer support to thunar
* xarchiver targets gtk+-2 only system
* all developers agreed that this would be better for everyone

both xarchiver and squeeze will likely exist longer, and possibly share some 
code, but in the short term both projects benefit more from the fork than if 
they would collaborate. Xarchiver can focus on stability and working on 
bare-necessity functionality. Sqeeuze can target the rapidly evolving 
thunar/xfce api.

as for the user, you just have more choice, which is always good.

Cheers,

Auke