Xfce4 Display Settings status
As promised, here comes the post about recent changes in Xfce4 Display Settings. For those who do not know, Xfce4 Display Settings is the dialog which allows you to set the screen resolution, refresh rate, to activate external monitors, etc.In Xfce 4.6, it only had one problem: it was totally useless and not working.
Then came mr_pouit, who decided it was time to clean that mess! He started to dig in the xrandr code to understand how the kryptic Randr API works and to bring that sweet magic to Xfce. So what do we have at the moment?
The new dialog is at the moment almost similar to the old one, except that every thing should work correctly and that it is rocking simple to use! We also added some goodies such as timed confirmation for critical changes and a simple dialog which can be called with the media keys or with Win + P to quickly configure an external output.
But there is more to come! First, we are still working on fixing bugs, simplifying the code to make it rocking stable and awesome like Barney's suit. Then, we are planning a lot of UI improvements, the biggest one being a graphical way of setting the screens' layout : it will allow the user to set the relative positions of external monitors. We hope to have that done in the next two weeks, but it could take a little more time. And yes, that'll mean that 4.8 TODO list will have lost one item 
Yes, Xfce 4.8 is delayed!
I've seen a lot of people on IRC lately asking why 4.8 was not released on the 12th of June as scheduled. Well, the schedule could not be respected and we currently have no scheduled release date. There is still a lot of work to do and we lost several key contributors and we obviously did not gain new ones...
So if you want to see Xfce 4.8 out, come and help us! We need help to implement the 4.8 features (have a look at the bottom of schedule page, there are links to the goals of each module) and to fix bugs.
A good way to get started is to choose some bugs on the Xfce bugzilla and to submit patches, come and bug us on #xfce to get your patches reviewed (it may take a while but that's definitely useful!). We need a lot more contributors if we want to get things moving forward!
In a post that will follow shortly, I will discuss a merrier topic: the new awesome work of the mighty mr_pouit (his only vice being that he maintains Xubuntu :D) on the display settings dialog (the dialog to set the screen resolution, frequency...). Stay tuned! (Yes, this means we are still active :D)
Xfce 4.8 Schedule Changes
As the Xfce release manager, I’d prefer to be the bringer of good news. Unfortunately, we have to make some adjustments with regards to the Xfce 4.8 release schedule.
You may well remember last year’s chaos with the 4.6 release date. We’re trying our best not to repeat that and if it should happen again, we’ll at least keep you posted about the issues as good as we can.
So, what’s the deal with 4.8?
One thing that hasn’t changed much is that our development team is very small. A hobby project of this size requires a certain amount of time to be invested by each individual developer. Time not everyone has as much has he would like to dedicate to Xfce.
Today, Brian announced his absence for the coming months due to his new job, leaving 2-3 of our core components (xfdesktop, xfconf and xfce4-session) more or less unmaintained (aside from bugfixes). The good news is that Jérôme (who has recently started to improve xfce4-settings and port xfce4-session to libxfce4ui) and Daniel (the maintainer of the thunar-shares-plugin) have offered their help with xfdesktop and xfce4-session.
Brian is not the only one having little time at hand though. I’m preparing myself for my final university exams, so ideally I’d be sticking my nose into lecture notes all day long. I still have the time to write mails like this but there hasn’t been much activity around thunar and related projects lately.
Again, I’m really happy to see people volunteering to help because that’s what we need right now. There’s a lot left to do before we can release 4.8. Let me get to that now.
As some of might have heard, thunar was ported to GIO this summer. Through GVfs, GIO brings new features such as SMB, SFTP, FTP browsing which some people use one a daily basis already. Now, GVfs has turned out to be problematic for us for various reasons. At first it shipped a HAL-based volume monitor with a hard-coded dependency on gnome-mount. Today it ships a volume monitor based on gnome-disk-utility (uses DeviceKit-disks itself) which proves to be inconsistent and somewhat incompatible to the HAL mounting code in exo.
The result: thunar-volman (not part of the core but important for thunar nonetheless) and xfdesktop will have to be ported to udev (the mounting being done with GIO, ideally). I’ve started working on this but this is far from being finished.
Question to the other developers: Didn’t xfce4-session use HAL for logging out and stuff? We might have to look into replacing those portions of code with something based on ConsoleKit, I guess?
HAL/udev is not the only issue however. With Xfce 4.8 we’ll be replacing libxfcegui4 with a new library called libxfce4ui. Not all core applications (again, xfdesktop being one of them, I think) have been ported to it yet. In most cases, this is no big deal and probably could be resolved within a few days though.
Then we have garcon, the much improved menu library that is supposed to replace libxfce4menu. At the time of writing the only feature it is lacking that is crucial for 4.8 is file system monitoring. We’ll probably implement basic monitoring like we had in libxfce4menu. Work on this hasn’t started yet.
Also, xfdesktop needs to be ported not only from ThunarVFS/HAL to GIO/udev but also from libxfce4menu to garcon.
So, as you can see there is quite a lot of work ahead of us. Taking into account the little free time some of us have these days, we’ve decided to postpone the 4.8 release until June 12th instead of April 12th. The entire release phase in our schedule has been moved by two months in time, as you can see on the official schedule wiki page:
http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.8/schedule
To be honest, I wouldn’t consider this new date fixed either. It all depends on how much we can do until the feature freeze on April 1st. I’m optimistic that meeting the deadlines is possible though.
For all of you who can’t wait until June, try out our development releases which are announced on http://identi.ca/xfce. I have at least something good to share: For a few weeks now I’ve been running Fedora 12 with a mixture of Xfce 4.6 packages and development package from the upcoming 4.8 series and the new components have proven to be very stable already.
I’m especially happy about the new panel which works almost flawlessly (except for a few dual head issues) and not only supports real transparency and more comfortable launcher creation based on garcon, but is also compatible to panel plugins written for Xfce 4.6. (Good work, Nick!)
So, I guess this is it. A mixture of good and bad. I hope nobody is too disappointed. As always, we’re doing the best we can.
Cheers!
Xfce4 Settings hacking
I started to hack a bit on Xfce4 Settings: I have a branch ready for review implementing a clipboard manager and started a branch to improve Xfce4 Settings Editor.
The clipboard manager allows the system to have a persistent clipboard. When you copy some text or an image and close the application where you copied it, the contents of the clipboard is no longer lost. I was able to add this functionality quickly thanks to the amazing work of Mike Massonnet in Xfce4 Clipman Plugin.
The settings editor is now able to edit existing properties, to rename them, to reset them to their default value or to remove them if there is no default value. It also monitors the channels to detect property changes and to update the view automatically and remembers the window geometry so that you don't have to resize the windows and the columns every time. I still need to work on adding new properties and improving the channel stuff: adding, removing or renaming channels should be possible in the future.
Xfce 4.8 Release Cycle Information
At the end of August, we've entered the development phase for the Xfce 4.8 release cycle. Today, we're hitting dependency freeze and I think this is a good time to inform you about how the cycle will look like and what we're planning to achieve for 4.8.The final 4.8 release is scheduled for April 12th, 2010, which is in about 8 months. We're trying to stick to a well-defined release policy for the first time. This includes frequent development releases of individual components and, most importantly, a time-based release cycle.
I'm confident that we can meet the schedule you can see below and would like to encourage everyone to participate in the development and continued improvement of Xfce 4.8, be it as a developer, a translator or a generally active member of the Xfce community.
Below you find detailed information about the 4.8 schedule, the release team, dependencies and planned features. This information is also available on the wiki.
Schedule
2009-08-16 - 2009-08-30: Planning phase
2009-08-31 - 2009-09-13: Extended planning phase
2009-09-13: Dependency freeze
2009-08-31 - 2010-01-31: Development phase
2010-02-01 - 2010-04-12: Release phase
2010-02-01: Xfce 4.8pre1 release / Feature freeze
2010-03-01: Xfce 4.8pre2 release / String freeze
2010-03-29: Xfce 4.8pre3 release / Code freeze
2010-04-12: Xfce 4.8 final release
Release Team
Release Manager: Jannis Pohlmann
QA Official: Stephan Arts
Release Assistants: Jérôme Guelfucci
Ali Abdallah
Yves-Alexis Perez
Robby Workman
Vincent Tunru
You can read up on the roles of these people on this page if you feel like you need to contact one of them because there's something going wrong with the development or release process.
Dependencies
Xfce 4.8 will depend on the following libraries and applications:
- cairo >= 1.0.0
- dbus-1 >= 1.0.0
- dbus-glib-1 >= 0.73
- gdk-pixbuf-2.0 >= 2.14.0
- gio-2.0 >= 2.18.0
- glib-2.0 >= 2.18.0
- gmodule-2.0 >= 2.18.0
- gobject-2.0 >= 2.18.0
- gthread-2.0 >= 2.18.0
- gtk+-2.0 >= 2.14.0
- libpng12 >= 1.2.0
- libwnck-1.0 >= 2.22
- x11 >= 1.1.0
The following dependencies are still left open:
- garcon-1 (no release yet, but used in different places)
- tumbler (no release yet, but used in different places)
- sphinx (for documentation)
Planned Features
In the following, we give you an overview of the features we are planning to implement for 4.8. Please note that due to the voluntary nature of the Xfce development, none of features are guaranteed to make it into the final release. This feature list may also not be complete as we might be able to implement even more during the cycle. This list is meant to give you an insight in what we're up to and what you might be able to expect in 8 months.
You can find a (hopefully) always up to date list on the wiki page. Each of the pages linked there contains more detailed information about the features, their implementation status and sometimes also who has taken the responsibility to work on them.
We welcome people to help in achieving these goals. All of our repositories are now managed using git (on http://git.xfce.org/) so it's easy to clone them and contribute code to Xfce.
exo
- Remove deprecated APIs and rename library to exo-1
- Add GIO module for URI handling to support gtk_show_uri()
libxfce4ui
- Port all Xfce core components to libxfce4ui instead of libxfcegui4
- Object-oriented session client
- GtkBuilder support for e.g. XfceTitledDialog
thunar
- Finish the migration to GIO/GVfs. Among other features, this will give us network browsing (windows shares, SSH, FTP etc.).
- Implement our own volume monitoring backend for GIO (based on HAL or DeviceKit-disks)
- Update thunar-volman to work with this volume monitoring backend and port it to xfconf
- Integration of remote locations in the side pane
- Improve integration of tumbler for thumbnailing
- Port all ThunarVFS thumbnailers to tumbler, write backwards-compatible tumbler plugin for thunar-thumbnailers
- Use a single progress dialog, grouping all file operations
- Extend the D-Bus interface so that e.g. xfdesktop can re-use the file properties dialog
- Startup notification support in the custom actions plugin
xfce4-appfinder
- Drop libxfce4menu and migrate to garcon
- Improve keyboard navigation
- Use startup notification when spawning applications
- Perhaps implement an extension API, so that xfce4-appfinder can act as a replacement for xfrun4 in the future.
xfce4-panel
- Finish the completely rewritten panel. This adds a lot of neat features and revamped dialogs. Amongst other things:
- Introduce an xfconf API for plugins
- Add an improved launcher plugin based on GIO, garcon and exo-desktop-item-edit
- Improved transparency support
- Better panel placement and multi-head support
xfce4-settings
- Netbook-friendly dialogs
- Improve keyboard shortcuts (seem to cause a lot of problems)
- Improve display and pointer settings dialogs
- Add a clipboard manager daemon
- Finish/fix the settings editor
xfdesktop
- Use GIO for the icon view
- Use garcon for the menu instead of libxfce4menu
- Improve icon view drawing routines
- Proper keyboard handling for the icon view
- Free icon positioning
- Allow right-click menus to be arranged differently
I think that's it. I hope you enjoy Xfce and are looking forward to the 4.8 release together with us!