Xfce Weekly News, April 1st through April 7th, 2005
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.
News From the Front
Subversion – Free At Last, Oh Lord, Free At Last
The long awaited move to Subversion has come. Auke performed the import initially, only to find a known bug in cvs2svn (which was used to preserve the Xfce CVS history) had corrupted the PNG images in the repository. A second import, and some fiddling resulted in SVN officially being the version control system of Xfce.
Those of you who are astute readers will remember that the move to Subversion grew out of a desire to move third party programs into the core repository. Jasper mentioned on his blog that, indeed, this was happening, with Xfmedia now available, hopefully with the goodies and other apps to follow.
Anonoymous SVN access can be had via
svn co http://svn.foo-projects.org/svn/xfce/$modulename/trunk $modulename
Where $modulename is the Xfce module that you would like to retrieve.
Subversion has been designed to solve some of the problems with CVS without changing the basic model or the work habits of the developers. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be little hiccups as we go. So, please forgive the occasional bit of confusion, it’s for a good cause.
The start of the move
Images broken
Let’s do it again
Mousepad 0.2.2 release
Mousepad, everyone’s second favorite text editor (everyone fights over number one!), saw a small release this week. 0.2.2 fixes a few bugs with 0.2.1, which itself fixed some bugs with 0.2.0. Hopefully the next release will be 0.3.0, for the morale of the maintainer.
Xfweb – Five Minutes of Funny
Shocking even your astute author and reporter, Botsie announced the Xfweb project, an ambititous project to write a web browser using the Xfce components. Xfweb would implement a core runtime using KHTML with which all of it’s interface implemented, much like Mozilla uses Gecko and XUL, except Xfweb would be sciptable in Lua via an embedded Parrot VM.
Honestly, up until the bit about Parrot, I’ll admit to having totally been strung along, and slapped myself on the forehead when I realized it was April Fool’s Day.
Xfweb – It’ll Cure Diseases and Increase Your Bust Size, Too
Mailing Lists Summeries
Mailing list traffic was pretty light this week. Onward and upward.
XFC – Xfce Foundation Classes
Xfce’s C++ binding only got a single thread this week, a question about including Glade generated C code in XFC apps, which turned into a question about XFC implementation. As usual Frank responded quickly, and concisely.
Widgets, Constructors, and Glade, oh my!
Thunar – File Management
Thunar also saw little traffic this week, with only one “fresh” thread. Xiong Jiang asked about where to find resources to help hacking on Thunar. Benedikt said “freedesktop.org and GTK.org”. To clarify, Thunar is just a Python mockup. There is no code to publicly hack on. Yet.
Xfce Developer
Xfce4-dev saw some decent traffic, but most of it was related to the SVN move, or minor stuff.
Jasper brought up a bug that was likely caused by the new restore on move patch to Xfwm4. Ori Bernstein (the patch’s author) submitted a fix. All was well.
Mei Ki started a rather lengthy thread trying to sort out a somewhat ephemeral xfdesktop bug that originally cropped up in Ubuntu Hoary. Two revelations followed – Ubuntu uses patched sources from os-works, and that if you fork software, it can be helpful to rename the fork, to avoid confusion.
Mickaël asked some questions about the sound files from Xfce version 3. He recieved no answers
A similar greeting was had for a small proposal about reorganizing the mailing lists. Likely this was due to the pending SVN move, but it could be because the proposal was moronic and by a clearly disrespected member of the community. (See Warnock’s Dillemma)
Mailing Lists Are Confusing, M’kay?
Pasi Orovuo made some comments about a potential change to the Mailcheck plugin, and announced that he had some code on his home machine, renamed “Mailwatch”. Brian then said that he had reimplemented the Mailcheck plugin from scratch and had also called it “Mailwatch”. Some collaboration was agreed one, and everyone went home happy.
Xfce User
Buck (who seems to have no last name) asked about binding his multimedia keys. Some friendly people helped him configure X so the keys would work. Let’s hear it for cooporation.
Equally lastnameless Ktala asked about kiosk mode. Warnock applies.
Tell Me About This “Kiosk” Of Which You Speak
Matt Price wanted a keybinding for the “always on top” mode in the WM. He got a lesson in how to set your reply header. A fair trade
Qiangning Hong was confused by the autogenerated “System” menu. He got some answers. Hopefully they were the ones he wanted.
Peter Humphrey wanted to cut down on compilation time in Gentoo, which was vaguely topical because he wondered if using Terminal to watch compile output made it faster or slower. The answer is “Off topic, but slower, in same cases”.
Gentoo – Fast As A Speeding Compile
Xavier Otazu wanted to know why there wasn’t a link to an XFC forum from the Xfce forum page. Answer: We actually don’t run the Xfce forum.
Where Oh Where Has That Little Link Gone?
Overall, a splendid time was had by all this week. Any questions, comments or requests on XWN, post ’em here. Until next week.
Edit: Thanks to Botsie for making the only real comment this week – it was “proofread you twit”. Duly noted.