Xfce, GTK+ 3.0 and GSettings

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hey,

On Thu, 18 Nov 2010 11:36:05 +0100
Denis Washington <denisw at online.de> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> This is my first post to this list. My name is Denis Washington, and
> I am an undergraduate CS student from Germany. First of all, I want
> to thank you all for everything you have done to make Xfce so great
> as it is now! I am using the latest git version and really, really
> love it. Congratulations for your archievements!
> 
> I would like to ask you about your future plans for Xfce after 4.8,
> most specifically:
> 
> * Is there a plan to port Xfce to GTK+ 3.0 in Xfce 4.10 (or a 
> hypothetical 5.0 version)? If I understand correctly, there are not
> that many API changes apart from the removal of deprecated symbols,
> and the port can be done in a mostly backwards-compatible fashion. If
> such an effort is in the makings, I would be willing to help out to
> make it happen!

That's not true, the changes in GTK+ 3.0 are not backwards-compatible:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/unstable/gtk-migrating-2-to-3.html

I think it's not going to be a hard job (and we can do it in branches
so it doesn't interfer with our other work). But I'd prefer if we wait
with this a bit longer than others. Traditionally in Xfce, we only
depend on stuff that has been released for at least half a year or so.
This ensures that a few bug fixes have been applied to our
dependencies and that distributions have already packaged them by
the time we have done a release. That's not a rule however, it's more
like something we usually do.

I don't have the GTK+ 3.0 release schedule at hand right now but I'm
not thinking about porting Xfce yet. (That's just my opinion however.)

> * Related to the first question: have you thought about moving from 
> xfconf to GSettings? I know that xfconf was just introduced in Xfce
> 4.6, but wouldn't it lower the maintainence burden to use a settings
> system directly built into glib instead of having to develop a
> seperate one? I think this also wouldn't introduce any heavy GNOME
> dependencies, as dconf, the default GSettings backend, only depends
> on glib. Using GSettings might also reduce resource usage when using
> GNOME applications in Xfce because there wouldn't be two daemons
> running (xfconfd and dconfd) but just one. Again, I would love to
> help here!

Yes, using GSettings would make sense. Xfconf is great though, so I
don't see us in a hurry here.

  - Jannis
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/attachments/20101118/70d7fc16/attachment.pgp>