Xfce4-dev Digest, Vol 102, Issue 1

[Raphael Groner]

> Date: Wed, 2 May 2012 11:38:56 +0200
> From: Mark Trompell <mark at foresightlinux.org>
> To: Xfce development list <xfce4-dev at xfce.org>
> Subject: Re: Gtk3 for Xfce 4.12?
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAEPa5y=3PC+v1faiGfAuyUG2WJw1SZ6RMFkniGiJEjhuJK6UHA at mail.gmail.com>
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> 
(...)
> > Now 4.10 is out in the wild, it is time to look at the 4.12 roadmap
> > and a part of that discussion is whether we want to port Xfce to
> > gtk3.
> 
> ... from my package maintainers view I would say, please do so, in the
> long term it's inevitable, anyway.
> And as time goes by more applications will be ported to gtk3 and some
> of them are throwing away gtk2 compatibility quite quick.

Well, what does "quite quick" mean? It's about upstream development
here. I can remember Xfce focussed on users' needs in the past, and
those do come from downstream, the distributions and its maintainers, so
far, so right. But, those claimed features in marketing of Xfce were
then: Lightweight libraries, Plugin API, simple to use applications.

> > Plugins: porting will be a lot of work in the core modules, not too
> > much for panel plugins, but this this needs to be done.
> >

Who does this? Does upstream development start to care only on the main
core, meaning only providing some libraries that aren't used by an
application anyhow? Then, please change your marketing, devs! I remember
xfburn is not working with Xfce 4.10 libraries, 4.10 got released
recently. Maybe nobody had the idea to test xfburn against 4.10
*before* the official release, so nobody needs it really? Why then, it
gets tested *after* an official announce?

Further, there is explicitly support for Alacarte. See the source of
xfce4-panel's internal applications menu plugin. You need only to grep
for "alacarte".

> not more than the usually rumours you hear after every release (yet).
> 

Well, very great argument! Caution, sarcasm in previous sentence.

> > The porting should happen in branches until at least all of core
> > works with gtk3. But that is something we can decide once we made a
> > decision.
> >

Please name that branch "Very broken" then.

Sorry, Gtk3 is the goal. But I think, there are more important user
needs to prioritize. Xfburn (broken since 4.10), Alacarte (broken since
at least 4.8) and Plugins (broken sometimes, depending on the
maintainer).

Okay, let's start to remove xfburn, alacarte and some plugins if they
are going to be dead for a while. But what will then remain? Not much,
for the point of view of an user. Distributions then will start to patch
for their own (not much other choice left) or implement applications
from other projects (Gnome, KDE, LXDE, etc.). Good bye, well integrated
desktop environment.