Richard Melville wrote:
> Any idea why XFCE is no longer supported in BLFS?

Basically, it is my own decision. I made it because of the following reasons:

1) No editors except myself use XFCE. Nobody cared about updating the ancient 
4.2.x version when 4.4.0 came out. So even if I put the new version into the 
book, the text will suffer from "bit rot".

2) It has a lot of external optional dependencies not in the book, such as 
PolicyKit and libnotify that do provide the functionality that developers would 
expect to be available.

3) I disagree with these developers, because of critical (for me) bugs that 
come 
with the code that uses them. Such bugs are known for a very long time (see, 
e.g., http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2891), but developers wait for a 
miracle (and a miracle from a wrong party - in this example, PolicyKit has 
nothing relevant to "default mount options" in its stated goals) and do nothing.

4) Newbies are likely to compile with all optional dependencies even if warned 
that they are harmful. I don't want to see the resulting bug reports on the 
blfs-support list.

In short, the package is too buggy, requires workarounds, and cannot be 
maintained in a good shape in the book.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov

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