New clock plugin in xfce4-panel trunk

[Nick Schermer]

2007/7/13, juha <kautto.juha at kolumbus.fi>:
> Basically the reason for building orage-clock panel plugin
> was to add more features since at that time all enhancements
> to clock plugin were denied. The idea was to keep basic clock
> plugin simple and small to save memory and cpu. Now this
> seems to have changed dramatically and all kinds of things
> are being added into it? The change from very minimalistic
> clock panel plugin to a very features rich plugin is pretty major
> thing considering the minimalistic approach Xfce has taken
> in the past?

I haven't made it more feature rich then the old plugin, except the
new binary clock (which is just fun and not too much code). Instead
I've splitted the old clock widget into 4 standalone widgets to make
the code easier to maintain (without duplicating code) and by using
cairo; the clocks all scale quite well in all panel modes.

So it's definitely not creating a new clock plugin that can do a lot
more then the old one, but more a rewrite to fix bugs and add some
feature requests that were denied in the 4.4 process. I'm aware of the
Xfce approach, but that doesn't mean we cannot use cairo and live in
the stone-age forever ;).

> Still I am hesitating to kill orage-clock plugin since I have no
> quarantee to get my features included. I would actually have
> preferred to keep the basic clock plugin simple and "basic"
> "Xfce type" and enhance the orage-clock pluging instead to
> have all needed bells and whistles for those who want to have
> them.

Well all the bells and whistles when they want to use an digital clock...

> Currently I am using big font time in the middle row and
> smaller font  weekday name and date in the upper and lower
> rows.  Doing this with your new code probably is not simple?

The backend support this (you can send any markup/time format to the
label), but from my side I'm not really sure I want an advanced
interface to change the format/color/etc, but that's discussable.

> Also left click uses X events to hide and show orage and similarly
> middle button uses X events to hide and show globaltime multi-
> clock viewer. So moving into the new plugin would need some
> changes into Orage also.

Yes I know, that why I asked.

> On the other hand I really like simplicity so merging from two to
> one is tempting. But I could also copy the new features into
> orage-clock panel plugin and then we could leave the old one
> as it is.

If you merge the new code into your plugin, we're back at square one
of this discussion. But it's your call.

Nick