Status of Xfce 4.8

[Mike Massonnet]

Hi all,

2010/4/2 Jannis Pohlmann <jannis at xfce.org>
>
> 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).

No release, that's ok'ish, but your mail update is more than useful. I
will give some of my comments but not in regard of main goals more as
a user POV.

[...]
>
> I think the following components are more or less ready to be released:
>
>  - exo
>  - gtk-xfce-engine (I guess?)

Is someone willing to pimp it up? Probably post-Xfce 4.8, but if
someone is willing to so s·he can. The rendering just has to be as
fast as it is now and more if possible :-)

>  - libxfce4ui
>  - libxfce4util
>  - xfce-utils

It has old stuff, and there are a dozen of bugs with patches that were
never token care at or only slightly with a comment on Bugzilla.

I ran a Bugzilla report[0] with all Xfce components that have patches attached.
[0] http://tinyurl.com/yb7sg9v

>  - xfce4-panel

No comments ;-)

>  - xfce4-settings
>  - xfconf
>
> This leaves us with the following components that still need a little
> bit of work:
>
>  - thunar

Works for me. However I'm not a volman user, all I do is stick in the
“device” and click on it, <ad>than I may use a software like Shotwell
for importing photos</ad>, but usually I just open files manually.

IMO releasing Thunar without volman is not that bad. We can always
release it later and even bundle it to a newer 4.8.x package.

>  - xfce4-appfinder

See patch at http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6043

>  - xfce4-session

I didn't try that one out for quite a while now. The last time I used
it it got on my nerves. The settings dialog is too complicated and
since the autostart thing is joined inside it I tend to not like it
anymore actually. IMO session is one thing, and a nice shaped dialog
for autostart stuff is another thing (just KISS), than it's true that
some apps get mixed between session management and autostart desktop
files... maybe having both mixed together in a single treeview may
look good? This way no need to make sure if an autostarted application
may be saved by session management.

There are other pending bugs but definitely not blockers.

>  - xfdesktop

The icon view clearly needs good attention! Of course we must remove
the thunar-vfs dependency, but IMO it's less important than getting
the icons usable. There are drawing issues I always hit e.g. the name
of file being cropped and this makes the desktop look in bad shape.

Currently master builds fine if you remove the desktop icons and
desktop menu. So all one would have to do is recoding the #if ICONS
... #endif? This doesn't sound too complicated, I'll be waiting for an
update about this. Daniel?

>  - xfwm4

Works great, even comes with small additional features.

> plus
>
>  - garcon
>  - tumbler
>
> Let's discuss these last ones in more detail.
>
[...]
> I guess that's it for now, please reply with your status reports and
> ideas on how we can fill the missing gaps.
>
>  - Jannis

Cheerful week-end,
--
Mike