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!