Xfce 4.10 Release Cycle Information

[Nick Schermer]

Hey everyone,

Last Sunday the planning phase for Xfce 4.10 was closed and we've now
entered the development phase. So this is a good moment to inform you
about how the cycle will look like and what we're planning to achieve
for 4.10.

The final 4.10 release is scheduled for January 15th 2012. For the
second time we try to follow the the release policy, so like in 4.8
you will see frequent development releases of individual components
and, most importantly, a time-based release cycle which looks a lot
more realistic the the one we had in 4.8.

I'm confident that we can meet the schedule you can see below, mostly
because there are no large ports planed (GIO,Gtk3 etc) and we can
finally work on the desktop again (the fun part!). So I'd like to
encourage everyone to participate in the development; be it as a
developer, a tester, a translator or a generally active member of the
Xfce community.

Below you find detailed information about the 4.10 schedule, the
release team, dependencies and planned features. This information is
also available on http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.10/roadmap.


Schedule
========

2011-02-13 - 2011-11-05: Development Phase

2011-11-06 - 2012-01-15: Release Phase
             2011-11-06: Xfce 4.8pre1 release / Feature freeze
             2011-12-04: Xfce 4.8pre2 release / String freeze
             2012-01-08: Xfce 4.8pre3 release / Code freeze

             2012-01-15: Xfce 4.8 final release


Release Team
============

Release Manager: Nick Schermer
QA Official: Jannis Pohlmann
Release Assistants: Jérôme Guelfucci, Yves-Alexis Perez, Jannis Pohlmann

You can read up on the roles of these people on
http://www.xfce.org/about/releasemodel if you feel like you need to
contact one of them because there's something going wrong with the
development or release process.


Dependencies
============

Xfce 4.10 will depend on the following libraries and applications:

  * gtk+-2.0 >= 2.20
    Same version for gdk-pixbuf-2.0 and gdk-2.0.
  * glib-2.0 >= 2.24
    Same version for gmodule-2.0, gobject-2.0, gthread-2.0 and gio-2.0
  * cairo >= 1.6
  * dbus-glib-1 >= 0.84
  * dbus-1 >= 1.1
  * libwnck-1.0 >= 2.30

The following dependencies are still left open:

  * libx11.

We've also planned to move garcon, tumbler and thunar-volman to core
to avoid the confusion in 4.8, but we haven't decided on that yet.

Planned Features
================

In the following, we give you an overview of the features we are
planning to implement for 4.10. Please note that due to the voluntary
nature of the Xfce development, none of features are guaranteed to
make it into the final release. This feature list may also not be
complete as we might be able to implement even more during the cycle.
This list is meant to give you an insight in what we're up to and what
you might be able to expect in 10 months.

We try to keep the roadmap pages up to date, so the individual module
page give you an idea about the status in master and who are
responsible to work on them. We welcome people to help in achieving
these goals, so don't hesitate to contact us (preferably on the
xfce-dev mailing list) if you think you have a good idea or want to
contribute code.

Below I've only listed the important changes for users, the individual
module pages have more information about internal changes.

exo:
  * Mime-type editor in the preferred applications dialog.

thunar:
  * Provide thunarx interface for desktop extensions (see
thunar-desktop below!).
  * Improve user directories experience.
  * Integrate remote locations into the side- and tree-pane.
  * Improve tumbler integration (already available in the Thunar-1.3.0
release!).
  * Port more thumbnailers to tumbler.
  * Sort by extension.
  * Improve responsiveness of file operations.

thunar-desktop:
  * New plugin for thunar to provide the functionality of xfdesktop.
This way thunar does not depend on libwnck but we benefit from the
code in thunar for icon desktops and more direct file operations.

xfce4-appfinder:
  * Merge the functionality of xfrun4 and xfce4-appfinder in a single
application.
  * Allow users to add custom actions.

xfce4-panel:
  * Add a container plugin to placing items on the panel is more flexible.
  * There are a lot of feature request left over after 4.8, see link
on roadmap or bugzilla.

xfce4-session:
  * Clean session button.

xfce4-settings:
  * Improve effort to make all dialogs compact and fit on small screens.
  * "Solidify" the Keyboard Shortcuts.
  * Improve multi-head configuration.
  * Easy themes installation.
  * Improve the pointer settings.

xfwm4:
  * Allow the Alt-Tab window to be themed.

xfce-utils:
  * Will be removed in 4.10. Xfrun4 will be replaced by the new
xfce4-appfinder and a lot of the scripts can either be removed or
moved to for example xfce4-session.

xfdesktop:
  * Will be removed in 4.10, replaced by the thunar-desktop plugin.

In Xfce 4.10 we will also work on the accessibility of the Xfce
desktop. Not all parts of the desktop work properly with screen
readers like Orca or are accessible with the keyboard. We already have
good contact with the a11y community of Gnome and they  really want us
to help with improving Xfce in this area, so expect a lot of good
things in this area!

We will of course also continue to make stable releases in the 4.8
branch and try to back port as much bug fixes as possible.

So I think that's it. I hope you enjoy Xfce and are looking forward to
the 4.10 release together with us!

Cheers,
Nick