Status of Xfce 4.8

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hey all,

according to the schedule on http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.8/schedule,
today Xfce 4.8pre1 was supposed to see the light of the world.
As you may have noticed, nothing happened (note that this is not a late
April fool's joke).

Back in 2009 I thought I would be able to donate enough time to Xfce to
make all of this happen without delays (as the release manager and the
one responsible for garcon/tumbler/thunar etc.). The last months have
proven that learning for my final university exams doesn't leave the
amount of hacking time I had hoped for. 

Anyway, let's not abandon the idea of releasing 4.8 entirely (even if
there will be a delay), shall we? ;) A fixed-date feature freeze may not
be realistic for us but the features we have already implemented are
worth being released to the public.

So, I'd like to gather a little bit of status information on the
various components. I know we have wiki pages for the original 4.8
ideas but they contain too many ideas and plans that we have to leave
for future development.

I think the following components are more or less ready to be released:

  - exo
  - gtk-xfce-engine (I guess?)
  - libxfce4ui
  - libxfce4util
  - xfce-utils
  - xfce4-panel
  - xfce4-settings
  - xfconf

This leaves us with the following components that still need a little
bit of work:

  - thunar
  - xfce4-appfinder
  - xfce4-session
  - xfdesktop
  - xfwm4

plus

  - garcon
  - tumbler

Let's discuss these last ones in more detail.


thunar (and thunar-volman)
==========================

Thunar is mostly ready. The only thing I consider essential for 4.8
(thunar 1.2) is feeding thunar-volman with device information that can
be used with udev instead of HAL. The 'jannis/port-to-udev' branch
contains code that implements this. It calls thunar-volman with sysfs
paths. The one thing to mention here is that this breaks
the latest release of thunar-volman which expects HAL UDIs. 

So what can we do about this? Ideally, someone would rewrite
thunar-volman based on udev/GIO (udev for device type detection, GIO for
mounting and investigating device contents). I started to work on this
back in January but I never finished it. The code is pretty
straight-forward though. The only thing that causes pain is the fact
that a lot of previously synchronous call now needs to be performed
asynchronously. 

I've considered this a blocker until now but I have to realize that
I won't be able to finish this rewrite within the next few months. So,
if we don't want to delay 4.8 because of this, thunar-volman will
remain broken for a while and people won't be happy about this.


xfce4-appfinder
===============

Depends on the fine-grained monitoring feature that is in the works for
garcon. Other than that, it's ready.


xfce4-session
=============

What's the status of the session manager? I remember we had plans to
port it to ConsoleKit and upower and whatnot. Did anyone start efforts
to get us there?


xfdesktop
=========

Daniel, what's the status of the 'danielm/port-to-gio' branch? Is it
ready to be used? 

Aside from the need to port xfdesktop to GIO, the only thing I can
think of that we need to do is to port it from libxfce4menu to garcon.
A quick and dirty implementation (to be used as a source of inspiration
at best) of this can be found in the 'jannis/port-to-garcon' branch.
Besides a lot of rather trivial search-and-replace kind of changes, we
need to wait for the menu monitoring feature to be added to garcon.


xfwm4
=====

AFAIR, xfwm4 needed to be ported to libxfce4ui (from libxfcegui4).
Jérôme, what's the status of that?


garcon
======

Garcon is in good shape. So much for the good news. The bad news is
that it lacks a critical feature that we need in 4.8: menu monitoring.
Incomplete support is there in the 'jannis/global-monitoring' branch
(which has a slightly misleading name, it's a mixture of global
monitoring and fine-grained change signals stuff). 

This is something we need to finish, as it is a blocker and makes many
other components (the panel menu, xfdesktop and xfce4-appfinder) less
pleasant to use (most notably, newly installed apps are not picked up).


tumbler
=======

Tumbler has seen two releases so far and the only thing it is lacking
is support for ThunarVfs thumbnailer scripts. This can be added later
on though, as a tumbler plugin shipped with tumbler itself, a plugin
shipped with thunar or a standalone component. It's not great that it
is missing but it is... ok-ish. A few changes in tumbler are required
for this to work (plugins need to be able to enforce a thumbnailer
cache rebuild in tumblerd) and that's something I can probably handly
somewhere in-between learning and sleeping. But not before 4.8.


I guess that's it for now, please reply with your status reports and
ideas on how we can fill the missing gaps.

  - Jannis
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