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

Xfce 4.8 Schedule Changes
de Xfce News de Jannis Pohlmann
1 personne a jugé cela intéressant.
 
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!

This post is the first (well, second if you count the one for Xfce4 Screenshooter) of a series of post offering some ways to get involved in Xfce. We need more people if we want to keep improving Xfce!

We are looking for new persons to help us to take care of the Xfce web site. We need a web developer/designer to handle the technical details and someone to improve/update the contents (can be the same person).

Our web site runs a home made PHP based CMS (with no online interface) which we would like to keep (improvements and bug fixes are welcome of course) for the time being. Though, its contents needs some love: some pages are strongly outdated, the style could be refreshed, some pages still use tables for layout, etc. We also need to find a solution for localization: the current system requires the user to translate raw PHP pages and often leads to errors when going live, up to the point that we are considering dropping translations. This will highly depend on the people who get involved in the web site.

The web developer position requires a good PHP, HTML and CSS knowledge to be able to handle the different aspects of the web site. A good command of English to update/rework the different pages and make the web site easier to use, this also requires to follow the Xfce development to update the web site accordingly. Of course, this work can be done as a team if several persons step in. This is a good opportunity to start contributing to the Xfce project and this work will be appreciated by a lot of Xfce users.

Please contact me if you are interested. Thank you in advance!