Making 4.8 panel On-Topic [Was: FOSDEM ideas]

[Nick Schermer]

Well then, a list of things that I can think of right now, probably
forgetting something here...

Panel
=====
- Almost complete rewrite of the code. Everything is now written in
gobjects and a lot easier to understand (more comments, better
function names, less code, smarter, faster, etc.).
- Dragging a panel to snap to screen edges (will work on a mouse less
implementation later). Greatly improved the positioning code.
- You can set the panel length (percentages).
- Lock panels -> no dragging possible.
- Alpha background (transparent panel).
- Item/plugin editor in the panel preferences.
- Xfconf, so you can change all panel properties externally except for
adding and removing panels (yet).

Plugin Framework
================
- ALL PLUGINS ARE FROM NOW ON COMPILED AS LIBRARIES. So you need to
change your Makefile.am (sorry). Will provide a script to do this
before compiling a plugin.
- DBus communication with external plugins.
- Plugins API is still the same (pfew).
- If you want to run an external plugin you can define
X-XFCE-External=TRUE in the desktop file. The panel will then start a
plugin wrapper that embeds the plugin, so you have all the advanatages
of the previous external plugin implementation (and I get something
that is easy to maintain).
- Because of the changes above, the XfcePanelPlugin is now a single
gobject, this drops a lot of complexity in the previous plugin
framework and also allows developing plugins as gobjects (yay).
- Various speedups here and there.

Internal Plugins
================
- Xfconf support in all plugins.
- All plugins use the gobject implementation.
- Iconbox: Merged in the tasklist plugins.
- Clock: Fuzzy clock mode. Still working on some other improvements.
- Tasklist: Dropped the WnckTasklist, to make the iconbox merge. Also
working on some other improvements (sorting, dnd, performance,
accessibility).
- Launcher: Improve desktop file support, not started yet. In the end
it should be a lot easier to create launchers.
- Launcher: Create new launchers from the command line.

Another goal is to close as much bugs as possible (mostly the ones
that are hard to fix in the currrent panel). You can find the
candidates in bugzilla with the 'panel 4.8' milestone.

Now you might want to see some code... Well not before 4.6.0 is
released, so the panel in trunk is in best shap as possible for the
release (maybe free copies @ fosdem, if that attracts more Xfce users
*evil*).

So, that it for now. Sorry to all the plugin devs for the makefile
change, but it was needed to make a big step forward in the plugin
framework (and it shouldn't be that hard to provide a script to do all
the hard work).

Cheers,
Nick