Goals for next Xfce releases

[Jani Monoses]

Hello

Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
> Hello friends,
> 
[...]
> 
> I'm interested to hear what other people are thinking about the
> future direction of Xfce.
> 
> cheers,
> 
>     Jasper

I'll summarize the features most often mentioned by xubuntu users, even 
that some may overlap with what has already been said in the thread

Thunar related:
              * search interface (tracker integration has been brought 
up here, and the fact that 0.5.4 is faster than it used to. And it 
embeds SQLite not MySQL AFAIK). Apparently there's a search interface in 
Zenwalk but of which I do not know many details.
              * windows shares (possibly covered by the planned FUSE work)
              * desktop handling for consistency (ex: single click) but 
would also mean less memory used overall if a separate desktop program 
was not run.

Panel:
              * gnome like menu with places and system (OTOH there are 
users saying they dislike that and prefer one menu). This is depending 
on the new menu library and possibly integration with thunar's notion of 
'places' in the system including recent documents and other boookmarks
So this is not really a panel thing but it is perceived as one :)

Other requests are generally apps lacking which IMHO are better solved 
by fixing existing good enough GTK apps and not writing new ones.

Other things I can think of from a packager/developer pov:

              * autotools replacement. Even with all the work going into 
custom Xfce autotools scripts and at least one guru among the devs these 
still pose problems for those who build from svn (forgetting the 
sequence of invocations or having to manually remove files or forcing 
reruns etc), for packagers (great PITA to carry a 1Mb diff of 
autogenerated files to a package just because we changed one line and 
had to run autoreconf). The tools work and do their job but maybe 
there's something that can do the same without as much hassle.
It is not reasonable to expect people to read 10s of pages of docs 
written for an era where there were dozens of different Unix flavors to 
cater for. It is weird to have the boilerplate scripts and code of the 
build system be larger than the actual code it helps to build. I think
Jannis at one point looked at Scons and cmake or at least there were 
files that suggest that in one of the plugins, I think verve. The fact 
that KDE which is a more complex codebase transitioned from autotools to 
cmake without loosing portability is promising.

             * configuration: if a new system is planned it may be worth 
looking at Havoc Pennington's plans for the next gconf .Noone in GNOME 
appears to work on that though.
           http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/plans.html

             * various apps: mousepad is good enough imho, it's the only 
app I am always surpised of how fast it starts. For complex things there 
are plenty editors already
                             printing - distros already have their messy 
and different ways of handling printers, I hope one of the the existing 
2-3 GTK/gnome based ones makes it to more than one distro. Xfprint would
have to do much duplicated work to be up to par with these (and they're 
not stellar yet either) so I do not think it is worth it. The ones I 
know of are printerdrake  in mandriva (gtk-perl), system-config-printer 
+ eggcups (python/c/gtk) in Fedora, probably some yast2 modules in SuSe, 
gnome-cups-manager in Ubuntu (gnome libs).
                          every other Xfce app could use other features 
but those are better handled as bugzilla request and not necessary to 
bring up here

Jani