Updates, Updates, Updates …
Alright, with me being back from Spain and a string freeze in CVS (Yes, string freeze .. get the idea?) I finally decided to do some work on the German translations again and (As you may witness here) I’m almost done. Xfprint has been updated recently (doesn’t show up yet since the overview is updated only once a day) so there is only Xfwm4 left which is being worked on by Olivier for two weeks now. So I’m going to wait for Olivier to finish his work and right after that I’m done with the translations for our first alpha release of the 4.2 branch.
Apart from that our new fish in bowl, Maarten Boekhold, is making progress on Xfce’s CGYWIN integration. We’re all eagerly awaiting screenshots of Xfce riding Billies best horse ;-).
Thats it for today .. I’m Moritz Heiber, saying, good fight .. good night
New Features?
I realise often that I tend to be very reluctant when anyone asks about a new feature in anything I work on. Generally, if it didn’t occur to me as a feature, my immediate reaction will be to not want to include it. I know that seems a bit silly, and perhaps mean. I’ve never really been able to explain before (in anything but general “this is just how I feel” terms) why I ususally react like this, but after reading Havoc Pennington’s Free Software Maintenance: Adding Features, I realise that this pretty much sums up my reasons. I think it also enumerates some really good rules of thumb that everyone should try to follow when submitting a feature request (even if you’re submitting the patch, too) to any kind of open source project.
So this is why I sometimes seem like to act like an ass when people are bugging me on IRC about adding features to xfdesktop or xfmusic4. It’s nothing personal, but I need to see some compelling justification before adding a feature when I’m not sure it’s worthwhile.
Base dir spec
We were in development freeze for a 4.2 alpha release, but this has temporarily been postponed for Olivier to add support for the new XOrg Composite extension (dropshadows!).
We took the opportunity to convert all Xfce modules to use the freedesktop.org Base Dir Spec to look up their files. Basically this means user configuration files will now be in ~/.config/xfce4/.
The transition isn’t complete yet, but we’re getting there. I do hope more projects will start to use this spec.
Heat and computers
Hey all,
I’m back from my hollidays, but I’m still rather incommunicado. Temperatures here were up to an uncharacteristic 32 degrees C, so naturally my computer — not being used to these temperatures — decided to die on me :^/
I’ll be back up and running soon … I hope.
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!
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.”
Shortcut editor
On the 17th, Olivier applied a patch i prepared to add a shortcut editor in the xfwm4 mcs-plugin; since i have improved it a little (it uses Brian’s XfceFileChooser now). It allows you to edit the window shortcuts and the 10 command shortcuts.
Screenshot
Menu shadow effect for gtk+-2.4.3
Hey, I took some time to prepare RPM packages and pre-patched source archives of gtk+-2.4.3 with the menu shadow patch applied (the patch remains the same and applies fine on gtk+-2.4.3)
Updates from the usual xfce page or from Sourceforge.
Panel icon themes
Yesterday I added a new panel icon theme implementation in CVS. The panel now follows the general icon theme, that can be set in the user interface dialog.
The goal is to have a fully themed panel with all the major icon themes (gnome and kde ones) out there, without having to create special xfce icons. To achieve this I use a list of possible icon names based on gnome and kde themes.
Unfortunately, the currently available icon themes are far from complete even for gnome and kde. I hope there will be a default icon name spec on freedesktop.org soon. That would help a lot.
So, the panel now looks for icons in this order:
- Xfce icons in the current theme, e.g. xfce-terminal.
- Gnome and/or kde icons in the current theme, e.g. gnome-terminal.
- A default (fallback) icon in the ‘hicolor’ theme, which is actually returned in the first looup step already.
For the new xfce icon names you can look in the icons/ directory in CVS.