Xfce News
The little mouse told me...

In order to keep the application quick, we must avoid loading any code until it is absolutely required (this is called “just-in-time” inventory, borrowing the concept from the automotive industry). This is one of the things that dynamic libraries are supposed to do, without any concern for the programmer. Notwithstanding, in elaborate applications it is very difficult to sort out the library dependencies amongst each other since all symbols are resolved at link time. To get around this hurdle, we use g_modules. Any library that can be dynamically linked to a program can also be loaded as a g_module. In this case, none of the library symbols are dynamically linked. With the use of some simple macros, we load the library and access the required symbol when it is required. In this fashion we can tell exactly when the library is needed and keep a very tight ship with regard to the exported symbols from the library. This is all very neat, but there is one big “but”. Whilst debugging a program, you cannot access any symbols in the library that has been loaded as a g_module. This makes debugging difficult, especially when the bug is located in the library. To get around this, when –debug=yes is specified during execution of the configure script, the g_modules are dynamically linked as .so libraries, allowing for full debug.

Currently the libraries generated from the code in the “modules” subdirectory behave in this fashion. A good deal of other code from the “libs” subdirectory will be relocated here as well as release 4.4 approaches. The dynamic libraries which pertain to the GUI interfase (treeview, gridview, deskview) will also be configured in this fashion. We don’t want any symbols from the wrong gui lying around in memory by mistake (BTW, gridview==navigational, deskview==root-window).

Here it is, a day and a half short of being two weeks late, the weekly news, as promised. Now perhaps Brian will leave me alone.

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Arrr.

Cause Brian guilted me (Rather easily) I’ll go ahead and tell you that XtWN will be out tomorrow, barring a goddamn hurricane.

PS – The ‘t’ stands for ‘tri-’

Well well … today I got pyxfce (python bindings for xfce) working for the first time. The initmodule looks like the most evil hack of a long time, but hey :P

Seems that most of the panel stuff was not detected correctly by the automatic codegenerator h2def. Need to code that manually. Or wait for jasper to gobjectize everything, whatever comes first.

I had some trouble with h2def expecting gobject-enums everywhere, but since ours aren’t (ours are just regular C enums) it doesnt work. After some egrep it seems fine …

Need to find out how to get the generator to find classes in other modules in the same directory. Now I get messages like ‘Could not write constructor for NetkPager: No ArgType for ‘NetkScreen*’
‘ and such kind of gibberish. Ow well… it will be defeated, eventually.

Now for my pirate name :)

Quite unexpected, to me, at least :)

Just a heads up. I’m preparing for the Carolina’s Psychology Conference as we speak, and it’s eating up all of my time and resources. If all goes well, expect the “weekly” news to be back on Monday.

Also, you can always email me at erikharrison AT gmail.com for requests or to drop me a line about any interesting Xfce related tidbits you may have.

This is kinda cool. XWN is in the most recent free LWN, under the development section.

Pretty cool, eh?

Hello Folks!!!

Let’s talk about Appfinder current status…
Actually Appfinder has been ported to a GTK Widget, embeddable into any application using Xfce libs.
It would be possibile to search, launch and view applications inside other applications…
This is useful for panel (for entries editing), xffm (for applications start) and for xfrun itself.

I’ve planned to merge Appfinder into subversion as it will become more stable than it is :-)
So ASAP! :-D

Cheers
–
Eduard Roccatello
eduard@xfce.org

This weeks XWN is brought to you (on time) by the letter “My Fiancee is Busy Tonight” and the number “Caffeine”

Unfortunately, you will have to wait till next week for a “What’s New in 4.4″ article. Still, surprise and intrigue await.

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So, for those who don’t follow xfce4-dev, we are in the process of moving to subversion. After an initial hiccup of broken png images all things seem to go well. Thanks Auke!

The anonymous access will most likely be done through http, but I don’t know exactly how yet. We’ll post updated instructions to the website soon.

Xfmedia is now also in the same repository and hopefully mousepad and perhaps thunar will follow. Our current idea is to eventually put all Xfce related code in this repository; that means moving oer the goodies from berlios. We’ll see about that later, I think.