Projects in xfce repos, ehm...

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Am Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:56:12 +0100
schrieb Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer at unix-ag.uni-siegen.de>:

> On Nov 21, 2008, at 00:02 , Christian Dywan wrote:
> 
> > Core: Components one needs in order to run a system in a useful way.
> > That includes roughly panels, window manager, whatever xfdesktop is,
> > the various settings applications, power management.
> > ^^ All of those should be stable. For instance, if the powermanager
> > isn't stable, I'd rather not see it there until it is.
> >
> > Apps: Applications that are useful, that really many Xfce users
> > would use, but that are essentially replaceable. Such as terminal,
> > file manager, editor, archiver, image viewer, media player.
> > ^^ Thunar is a special one: it cannot practically be independant
> > from Core, but semantically for me it should be.
> >
> > Goodies: All the rest kind of, things that are useful but not  
> > regularly
> > maintained, somewhat specialized, unstable.
> 
> I haven't done anything in Xfce recently, but you'll get my 2cents  
> anyway:
> 
> This kind of stupid discussion repeats approx. once per year, and
> its always the same arguments pro and con. Given that Xfce still
> attempts to deliver a desktop environment and not only a window
> manager with nice buttons to start applications, it's really nonsense
> to talk about defining "core" w/o applications like the file manager,
> editor, terminal, image viewer, etc. A default install of Xfce should
> give you anything you need to get started and this "default install"
> should be represented in a common repository (and bug tracker, etc.)
> so that people who want to get involved (few enough already) don't
> get frustrated having to look up the source for these essential
> components first (no matter if they want to contribute code,
> documentation, translations, or whatever). If someone wants to
> replace application A with application B, he/she can do this later,
> but this is a special case; the majority of people (including myself,
> not just newbs as someone will surely attempt to argue) just want a
> working desktop environment, with file manager, editor and terminal
> at least!

You certainly have a point here and that's what I was trying to express
in my initial mail ("we should concentrate on what the user needs and
to which degree we can fullfil that need using the components and
resources we have").

> I'd even suggest to drop the separate goodies repository completely  
> and move everything into one repo similar to GNOME. That way every  
> Xfce maintainer is first-class. Of course, the "core" installer
> should not include every panel plugin (esp. since not every plugin
> compiles on every platform), but maybe a nice set of plugins to get
> started.

I kind of don't like the current two-repositories approach either. It
has something of keeping those out of the main repository who do
"minor" stuff. One repository might also lower the barrier for goodies
developers to contribute to the "core" (whatever that is now) since
they would not have to reach out into a completely different repository
for that.

I just read about the GNOME release process and I kind of like it. It
seems like their release team comes up with the schedule and every
component in the repository has to meet certain rules to be part of the
release. Then everyone just uploads their releases to the server and
than they the release. It doesn't really matter what's core and what is
not - distributions will pick up what they want anyway.

Maybe we just have a problem defining "core" because of the installer,
the xfce-all-in-one tarball and our current complicated release
process. What if we just got rid of these three things? Or at least of
the current way release Xfce and think of the tarball/installer as a
much less important thing? 

  - Jannis
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