Xfce 4.10 entering planning phase

[Nick Schermer]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Jannis Pohlmann <jannis at xfce.org> wrote:
> Today 4.10 enters the planning phase, which means that until 2011-01-31
> (or until 2011-02-13 if this is not enough time) we will have to do the
> following:

We go with 13 feb, 1 week after fosdem to update the pages.

>  1. Decide who's in the release team and who takes which job.

I'm fine with being the release manager, but since I'm highly
incapable of writing announcements, someone else is going to do that
;-). Personally, I'd prefer it the way it was in 4.8; I do most of the
package releases, Jannis writes announcement, Jerome/me updates the
website. Even how busy people are, that never took more then 2 hours
in total, so I doubt that will be a problem if we continue that way,
since that only occurs only 4 times a year max (taking the average of
the last 4 years).

>  2. Discuss the so-called Essential Dependencies for the cycle and
>     decide which versions to depend on. The end of the Planning Phase
>     marks Dependency Freeze and after this point features depending on
>     more recent dependencies have to be optional.

Gtk2 for sure, don't know if 2.22 is realistic, but that will give us
the opportunity to slowly prepare for gtk3, but I don't think any gtk2
fully compiles with gseal enabled, so it will only bring problems I
think. Else I think we should go with gtk 2.18 and glib 2.22. Debian
anything to say about this?

>  3. Think about which features are realistic and make a
>     non-obligatory list. Inform the community about 1., 2. and 3. at
>     the end of the planning phase.

Panel will only see polishing and relative small enchantments + docs.
I want to merge xfce4-appfinder and xfrun4 this release and get rid of
xfce-utils if possible. Probably drop some api in 4util too, bit of
xfce4-settings love... Furthermore anything in core that bothers me,
as usual ;-). Will update the wiki soonish.

That said, 4.8 core took too much time this release, leaving terminal
and mousepad in an unmaintained state. I want to pick that up again.
Already have a half-baked GIO mousepad 0.3 and terminal has a pile of
bugs that need to be fixed.

>   4. Decide which components to remove from Xfce core and discuss
>      whether there's anything we want to take into the core from now
>      on.

I'd say move gui4/4menu/thunar-vfs to /archive. In /lib means they
need bugs fixes too. I'd prefer to have garcon, volman and tumbler in
core.

>   5. Discuss how long we want this cycle to be, eight months being the
>      minimum.

Release 4.10 in a year, also in januari. The release model allows us
to make devel releases whenever we want and if we make
regression-related-enchantments/string breaks in 4.8 not too strict (i
want to add tasklist dnd again, but this requires 1 new string for
example) we can keep supporting 4.8 in a better (more fun) way then
4.6.

In a year gtk3 is also probably worth looking at and in a somewhat
usable state, but we can of course start with that in branches too.

Nick