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

[Vincent]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 8:18 PM, Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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).
>

Very nice, kudos for the hard work!
(Any plans for supporting dragging launchers to the panel (i.e. not to
already-created launchers)? That's the biggest missing feature now IMHO :)


>
> Cheers,
> Nick



-- 
Vincent
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