Proposal to create a welcome app for XFCE

[Alexander Schwinn]

Hi Ajrat,

interesting, first time I hear about Cambalache.

 From looking at your link, it seems to be no official gtk tool yet, 
since it's in a user-specific repository. So far, there seems to be only 
a single contributor and it did not have a 1.0 release yet. However, 
there are some announces mentioning that Cambalache will be the official 
sucessor of Glade.

The last non-translation commit for glade was Jan. 2024, and it looks 
like the person who developed Cambalache is the same one who maintained 
glade in the past.

The README.md claims to use some custom wlroots based wayland compositor 
and something called "Merengue" .. not clear to me if that is only 
relevant for the application itself, or as well for the generated code. 
The generated Xfce GUI's are supposed to as well run on X11 for the time 
beeing. Does Cambalache support that?

If the generated code runs on X11, personally I would be fine with going 
for Cambalache, however I mostly avoided using RAD tools myself in the 
past for the parts I maintain, so I might be the wrong one to ask here. 
Best idle at the #xfce-dev matrix channel yourself and ask if Cambalache 
as well would be fine for the other core-devs. (To idle in #xfce-dev 
anyhow will make sense when you are about to develop Xfce applications) 
Here a link:

https://docs.xfce.org/contribute/dev/start#communication_with_the_xfce_development_team

 > I can promise to maintain it for the long term, at least until 2027.

I would not call 2027 "long-term" from a Xfce POV 🙂 In case we do a 
platform release end of 2026, it would be nice to have a maintainer 
until at least mid/end of 2027 in order to do possible bugfixes for 
issues which might be filed after the platform release.

 > This will be my first GTK application, so I would be very grateful if 
someone from the team would be willing to review my code and provide 
guidance.

Sure, no problem on that.

Last but not least, it would be desirable to use the same RAD tool for 
all Xfce components in order to prevent fragmentation. It seems to be 
possible to import a *.glade file into Cambalache. So if nobody puts a 
veto, and you are motivated, it would be great if you as well could 
upgrade the existing *.glade projects to Cambalache at some possible 
later step.

Best regards, Alex

Am 17.09.25 um 01:11 schrieb Айрат Махмутов:
> Hello Alexander,
>
> Thank you for your quick and clear answer. I understand now why 
> Blueprint is not a good fit for XFCE, and I appreciate you explaining 
> that.
>
> You mentioned using Glade for GUI building. I am concerned that 
> Glade's development has slowed down. Instead, I would like to use 
> Cambalache as the UI designer tool. It is a modern alternative that 
> supports both GTK3 and GTK4, which makes it a great fit for XFCE.
>
> Link: https://gitlab.gnome.org/jpu/cambalache
>
> To make sure it works well with XFCE-specific widgets, I have already 
> successfully added support for |Libxfce4ui|to Cambalache. I used the 
> |gir|file to generate a catalog, and it worked. Here is the catalog 
> file it created:
>
> <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' standalone='no'?>
> <!DOCTYPE cambalache-catalog SYSTEM "cambalache-catalog.dtd">
> <cambalache-catalog name="Libxfce4ui" namespace="Libxfce4ui" 
> prefix="Xfce" version="2.0" targets="2.0,4.16,4.18,4.19">
>   <type>
> ("XfceClipboardManager","GObject","Libxfce4ui","4.19.5",None,None,1,None,None,None),
> ("XfceFilenameInput","GObject","Libxfce4ui",None,None,None,1,"container",None,None),
> ("XfceSMClient","GObject","Libxfce4ui",None,None,None,None,None,None,None),
> ("XfceScreensaver","GObject","Libxfce4ui","4.18.2",None,None,1,None,None,None),
> ("XfceTitledDialog","GObject","Libxfce4ui",None,None,None,1,"container",None,None)
>   </type>
> ... [rest of the XML content] ...
> </cambalache-catalog>
>
> I am committed to developing and maintaining this welcome application. 
> I can promise to maintain it for the long term, at least until 2027.
>
> This will be my first GTK application, so I would be very grateful if 
> someone from the team would be willing to review my code and provide 
> guidance.
>
> Thank you for your consideration and for asking others on Matrix.
>
> Best regards,
> Ajrat Makhmutov
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xfce4-dev mailing list
> Xfce4-dev at xfce.org
> https://mail.xfce.org/mailman/listinfo/xfce4-dev