Status of Xfce 4.8

[Mike Massonnet]

2010/4/3 Mike Massonnet <mmassonnet at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
>
> 2010/4/2 Jannis Pohlmann <jannis at xfce.org>
>>
>> Hey all,
>>
> [...]
>>
>>
>>  - 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.

It's good the devices are simply “ejectable”, at least this is how
they appear here (the unmount action per partition on each device is
well a piece of useless actions). However, I tried sftp://localhost
and it worked fine, except that I'm unable to unmount any such
“volumes.” Are there some plans for this? Why don't they appear in the
sidepane? Is there going to be any custom “Connect to...” dialogue?

>>  - 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.

Works fine for me, I didn't try any extravagant options or anything, I
just installed and logged into an Xfce session.

>>  - 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?

Building the applications menu works with the jannis/port-to-garcon
branch (except an undefined function that was renamed between
libxfce4menu and garcon), and except rewriting code I don't see
anything to be improved. The only thing to move is the default menu,
since the panel plugin is now inside the panel tree, we can install a
default menu file through xfce-utils to be usable for both menu
showers, and build a generic applications menu in a fallback action.

>>  - garcon

Indeed, definitely needs monitoring.

>>  - 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
>

-- 
Mike