Hey everyone, Last Sunday the planning phase for Xfce 4.10 was closed and we've now entered the development phase. So this is a good moment to inform you about how the cycle will look like and what we're planning to achieve for 4.10.
The final 4.10 release is scheduled for January 15th 2012. For the second time we try to follow the the release policy, so like in 4.8 you will see frequent development releases of individual components and, most importantly, a time-based release cycle which looks a lot more realistic the the one we had in 4.8. I'm confident that we can meet the schedule you can see below, mostly because there are no large ports planed (GIO,Gtk3 etc) and we can finally work on the desktop again (the fun part!). So I'd like to encourage everyone to participate in the development; be it as a developer, a tester, a translator or a generally active member of the Xfce community. Below you find detailed information about the 4.10 schedule, the release team, dependencies and planned features. This information is also available on http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.10/roadmap. Schedule ======== 2011-02-13 - 2011-11-05: Development Phase 2011-11-06 - 2012-01-15: Release Phase 2011-11-06: Xfce 4.8pre1 release / Feature freeze 2011-12-04: Xfce 4.8pre2 release / String freeze 2012-01-08: Xfce 4.8pre3 release / Code freeze 2012-01-15: Xfce 4.8 final release Release Team ============ Release Manager: Nick Schermer QA Official: Jannis Pohlmann Release Assistants: Jérôme Guelfucci, Yves-Alexis Perez, Jannis Pohlmann You can read up on the roles of these people on http://www.xfce.org/about/releasemodel 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 4.10 will depend on the following libraries and applications: * gtk+-2.0 >= 2.20 Same version for gdk-pixbuf-2.0 and gdk-2.0. * glib-2.0 >= 2.24 Same version for gmodule-2.0, gobject-2.0, gthread-2.0 and gio-2.0 * cairo >= 1.6 * dbus-glib-1 >= 0.84 * dbus-1 >= 1.1 * libwnck-1.0 >= 2.30 The following dependencies are still left open: * libx11. We've also planned to move garcon, tumbler and thunar-volman to core to avoid the confusion in 4.8, but we haven't decided on that yet. Planned Features ================ In the following, we give you an overview of the features we are planning to implement for 4.10. 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 10 months. We try to keep the roadmap pages up to date, so the individual module page give you an idea about the status in master and who are responsible to work on them. We welcome people to help in achieving these goals, so don't hesitate to contact us (preferably on the xfce-dev mailing list) if you think you have a good idea or want to contribute code. Below I've only listed the important changes for users, the individual module pages have more information about internal changes. exo: * Mime-type editor in the preferred applications dialog. thunar: * Provide thunarx interface for desktop extensions (see thunar-desktop below!). * Improve user directories experience. * Integrate remote locations into the side- and tree-pane. * Improve tumbler integration (already available in the Thunar-1.3.0 release!). * Port more thumbnailers to tumbler. * Sort by extension. * Improve responsiveness of file operations. thunar-desktop: * New plugin for thunar to provide the functionality of xfdesktop. This way thunar does not depend on libwnck but we benefit from the code in thunar for icon desktops and more direct file operations. xfce4-appfinder: * Merge the functionality of xfrun4 and xfce4-appfinder in a single application. * Allow users to add custom actions. xfce4-panel: * Add a container plugin to placing items on the panel is more flexible. * There are a lot of feature request left over after 4.8, see link on roadmap or bugzilla. xfce4-session: * Clean session button. xfce4-settings: * Improve effort to make all dialogs compact and fit on small screens. * "Solidify" the Keyboard Shortcuts. * Improve multi-head configuration. * Easy themes installation. * Improve the pointer settings. xfwm4: * Allow the Alt-Tab window to be themed. xfce-utils: * Will be removed in 4.10. Xfrun4 will be replaced by the new xfce4-appfinder and a lot of the scripts can either be removed or moved to for example xfce4-session. xfdesktop: * Will be removed in 4.10, replaced by the thunar-desktop plugin. In Xfce 4.10 we will also work on the accessibility of the Xfce desktop. Not all parts of the desktop work properly with screen readers like Orca or are accessible with the keyboard. We already have good contact with the a11y community of Gnome and they really want us to help with improving Xfce in this area, so expect a lot of good things in this area! We will of course also continue to make stable releases in the 4.8 branch and try to back port as much bug fixes as possible. So I think that's it. I hope you enjoy Xfce and are looking forward to the 4.10 release together with us! Cheers, Nick _______________________________________________ Xfce-i18n mailing list [email protected] http://foo-projects.org/mailman/listinfo/xfce-i18n
