Goals for next Xfce releases

[Benedikt Meurer]

Jani Monoses wrote:
> 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.

Noted. If anybody wants to do some prototype work here, feel free to do so.

>               * windows shares (possibly covered by the planned FUSE work)

Yep, as said probably in Thunar 1.0.

>               * desktop handling for consistency (ex: single click) but 
> would also mean less memory used overall if a separate desktop program 
> was not run.

Thunar will handle that, but probably not for 1.0.

>               * 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.

Err, no.

>              * 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

Yep, it's designed after that ideas, and will be desktop neutral. But
maybe not for 4.6. Depends on spare time.

> Jani

Benedikt