Status of Xfce 4.8

[Jérôme Guelfucci]

On 02/04/10 00:16, Jannis Pohlmann wrote:

Hey Jannis,

> 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?

This was done by Ali and merged to master, I had no issues with it so 
far. We still need to fix some things in the d-bus stuff and to 
investigate several session related issues (applications started several 
times for example).

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

I don't think so.

>
> 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?

Port done. Session stuff is as a consequence completely broken, I'm 
working on it but I have very little time atm and it's complicated to 
debug because it's a mix of libxfce4ui, xfwm4 and xfce4-session code.

>
>
> 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

Jérôme