xfmusic4, goneme
those of you following the xfce4-dev mailing list know that i’ve been working on a lightweight music player, which i’m calling xfmusic4. i’ve made a couple alpha releases, and put up a public CVS repository. more info can be found on the project page.
apparently a critic of gnome has decided to put his money (or the OSS equivalent) where his mouth is, and has formed the goneme project. i think it’s nice to see someone stop complaining and actually do some work, but, after reading his arguments about what’s wrong with gnome, it sounds to me that he’s just mostly ignorant and uninformed, and, in some places, blatantly incorrect. my prediction: he gets a lot of support initially, but mostly from a crowd that doesn’t have much development ability to speak of. the project produces little code beyond the simple patch that’s already up there, and fizzles out relatively quickly.
on an unrelated note, planets gnome and freedesktop are linking to us now. i wonder if they did that before or after i put up links to them here. probably before… i’m not that special ^_~. anyway, if anyone gets here from there, hi guys!
ok, i’ll stop editing this post after this one, i promise. i came upon this, some usability info on .desktop files. we should probably start doing something like this for xfce. i’m kinda against the “GenericName” concept – i think it really dumbs down the user experience. there are many many windows users that honeslty believe that microsoft internet explorer is “The Internet”, and i don’t want to see similar things happening in our world. at the same time, i feel for new linux users that fire up their desktop and have no idea what any of the apps do. i wish menu items would display tooltips when you assign them…
Bugs
We currently have 62 bugs in the database. Of those bugs, 20 are marked RESOLVED, so that leaves us with 42 bugs to handle.
A little more than half of the open bugs are assigned to someone, the rest is still marked ‘new’. Some bugs are actually feature requests, while others are ‘real’ programming errors. Most bugs already have some comments on them, to clarify what is going on or to ask for more information.
If you are feeling bored or are looking for something to help us with, this is a good place to start. You could look at some of the unassigned ones, or — hey, I can try — start fixing the ones assigned to me ;-)
Oh, and if you feel something is wrong with Xfce, please help us by reporting it in the bug tracker.
Just thought I’d try and draw some extra attention to this very useful development tool. Happy bug hunting!
Linux distros
This is not a rant about favorite linux distros. Go here if you were looking for that :-)
No, I just read this article by Ian Murdock. Interesting perspective, especially this:
The Linux distribution industry needs to start looking at Linux in a new and different way–as a platform to be shared rather than as a product to be owned.
Would be nice indeed.
bloat?
an excerpt:
But most of all, you will see programs getting a Mozilla complex… Lots and lots of bloat, with no effort going into optimizing anything. KDE and GNOME have that problem. Even formerly lightweight programs like XFce are now heavy programs (thanks in no small part to the bloat of GTK2).
*sigh* ignoring for the moment the fact that gtk2 is actually much more cleanly implemented and less bloated than gtk 1.2 (what makes gtk2 slower in many cases is pango-xft or pixmap-heavy theme engines), just the perception that xfce is bloated makes me sad =(.
but i think that’s the natural course of things – no matter how much you want to write a barebones piece of software that is very light, there’s always the pressure to add more features as time goes on. deciding which features are necessary (or at least just useful) and which features actually constitue “bloat” is the problem, i suppose. but the fact remains that it’s very hard to look at a piece of software and say, “there. it’s done. i have no desire to add anything more to it. it does everything i want it to do – no more, no less – and there will never be a need for it to do anything more.”