Xfce 4.10 entering planning phase

[Florian Rivoal]

>> As for libxfcegui4 "deprecation", work has to be done in all panel
>> plugins to update them to use libxfce4ui. I know frivoal volunteered
>> to overhaul the plugins in the coming months, but i think there's
>> quite some work in this area, as some of them are more or less
>> abandoned. Those tasks are easy pie for new contributors who would
>> like to get familiar with xfce codebase, so more ppl in this area
>> would be welcomed ! :)

There is a fair amount of work, that's true. I am making slow but steady  
progress on this, and this should speed up a bit now that 4.8 is out.

But you're right: I have a lot of plugins on my hands, and fixing these is  
an easy task for beginners. I don't mind doing all of them, but there are  
some plugins I don't really have personal interest in, so if there are  
volunteers, there is definitely room for more people in this area.

In any case, if people are willing to contribute, but not sure about  
committing to long term work, filing patches is really appreciated. There  
is a queue of a few years worth of patch reporting on most plugins, but I  
am making my way through these, and applying them faster than they are  
reported :)


Back to the original point, I don't think droping libxfcegui4 in 4.10 will  
be an issue from the point of view of the plugins, especially if we decide  
on the long cycle that's currently proposed.

> I posted patches on the bug tracker to port two plugins to libxfce4ui
> already. I'll do some more later. It would be nice however if someone  
> would
> explain how to properly port functions such as xfce_err/warn and so on.

Thanks for the patches. I will port all the plugins I can to libxfce4ui in  
a while, but I don't want to do that before I make sure they all work with  
4.8 with libxfcegui4. There is a lot of low hanging fruit and easy things  
to fix, that can make the plugins usefull both in 4.8 and for people still  
stuck on 4.6. Once I have the obvious problems under control, I'll start  
the migration to libxfce4ui etc.

I've done that for a couple of plugins already, but I have a bunch left to  
do. I am fairly confident that by spring, all plugins I am maintaining  
will be able to work well on 4.8, even though a lot might be doing that  
using deprecated stuff.

  - Florian