[Thunar-dev] Introduction

[Landry Breuil]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 4:42 AM, André Miranda <andre42m at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
> Here we go:
> - Roadmap update, started to push commits to my GitHub fork.
> - @Simon, Xfce needs UX improvements almost in every component, once the
> port is complete I'll get in touch.
> - @Roland, thanks for your feedback, I've just updated the bug.
> - @Francesco, check git.xfce.org and look for a plugin that you think it's
> useful and play with it, see if it still works (clone, ./autogen.sh, make
> and run it) then you can start the porting process. Plugins are a bit tricky
> to put into the panel, I usually configure --prefix=/usr, install them and
> reload the panel, but maybe I'm too dumb and there is a better way. If
> you're confident enough, there are some apps pending, e.g. orage, xfburn,
> squeeze, but I think that porting an app is much more challenging.

There's another option to directly run plugins from the source
checkout if you dont want to overwrite a 'released/stable' plugin
coming from your distribution.

- Build the plugin with your changes
- do a symbolic link from
/usr/lib/xfce4/panel//plugins/libyourplugin-git.so to
/where/your/src/is/panel-plugin/.libs/libyourplugin.so
- copy /usr/share/xfce4/panel/plugins/yourplugin.desktop to
/us/share/xfce4/panel/plugins/yourplugin-git.desktop
- edit the latter to point at 'yourplugin-git' instead of
'yourplugin', nodify the 'Name' entry to distinguish your instance
(that'll be the title of the plugin in the add dialog)
- add X-XFCE-API=2.0 to the desktop-git file

and the 'git' version of the panel plugin should be available in the
'add plugin' panel dialog.

Example for mpc (here everything is in usr/local, but on linux it'll
rpobably be usr) :
I have this symlink:

/usr/local/lib/xfce4/panel//plugins/libmpc-git.so@ ->
/home/landry/src/xfce/xfce4-mpc-plugin/panel-plugin/.libs/libmpc.so

and this desktop file:

$cat /usr/local/share/xfce4/panel/plugins/xfce4-mpc-plugin-git.desktop
[Xfce Panel]
Type=X-XFCE-PanelPlugin
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=MPD Client Plugin (git)
Comment=A client for MPD, The Music Player Daemon
Icon=applications-multimedia
X-XFCE-Internal=FALSE
X-XFCE-Module=mpc-git
X-XFCE-API=2.0

I've been using this method for all panel plugin development since a
while, it allows to compare what's in the 'last release' (ie coming
from your distro/os) with what you have in your git changes.

As for the plugin themselves, porting hasnt started at all for some,
ie time-out, cpugraph (that one might be a bit hard), places,
weather... pick one you use !

Landry