FOSDEM ideas

[Jelle de Jong]

Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> Hey guys,
> 
> 4.6 beta2 is out the door - let's do some thinking about taking
> part in FOSDEM 2009. Personally, I'd be happy to attend and it should
> be no problem for me at all.
> 
> If enough people show their interest, do we want to apply for a
> developer room and do some talks about Xfce 4.6 (retrospectively) and
> 4.8 (involving brainstorming together)? We still have a few days to
> apply for one and I think it would be cool to do that.
> 
> This raises the question what kind of talks we could do. Here's what I
> think might be worth a talk:
> 
> General
> =======
> - Introducing Xfce (what is it? how has it evolved over the years?
>   who's Xfce? how is it shipped? etc.)
> 
> Covering 4.6
> ============
> (The ideas below are somewhat inspired by
> http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.6/videos)
> 
> - Introducing 4.6 (overview over new features and changes since 4.4)
> 
> For developers
> --------------
> - Xfconf
> - Xfce as a platform (overview over the libraries and usage examples
>   e.g. for libxfce4menu)
> - Extending Xfce (covering Thunar and panel plugins)
> - Xfce for third parties
> 
> For users
> ---------
> - Customizing Xfce (maybe in parallel with a live demonstration;
>   including xfconf-query and xfce4-settings-editor)
> 
> Covering 4.8
> ============
> - Feature preview
> - Brainstorming sessions on certain topics (not really a "talk")
> - Xfce release management (how has it evolved, how did it work in 4.6,
>   what and how can things be improved, what's the release plan for
>   4.8)
> 
> Considering that many of us live in Western Europe quite close to
> Belgium I'm really optimistic that we can make this happen. So ... what
> do you think?
> 
>   - Jannis

I would love to have some sessions with developers discussing how xfce
is used by users and companies to see if we can work together and see if
we can make free more resources to help the developers.

I personally would like to give some small demonstrations to the
developers how I develop and use my xfce based debian, ubuntu and fedora
distributions for my customers (schools, governments, small businesses
and non computer literate people)

To be sort I try to only use xfce4-panel and xfwm4, and like to be able
to configure everything through command-line commands and human and sed
readable configuration files. I am afraid xfce becomes a second gnome
a-like with his own nested libraries and configuration register, slowly
killing all benefits why I choice xfce. As sad this is a feeling that is
not based on any science, but it would be nice to discus this feeling
and remove some of these fear, uncertainty and doubts.

I really hope xfce4.8 comes soon in debian sid so I can do some serious
testing and see how things changed and work now. Is there a debian
packager that could provide some info on the planning?

Keep up the goods work.

Best regards,

Jelle