I've started hacking on the migration of Thunar to GIO on April 9th. In about 61 commits, I've reduced the original number of ThunarVFS references in the Thunar source code dramatically. The most important and probably most time-consuming part of this work is only mentioned briefly on those pages: rewriting all recursive copy/move/trash/restore/chmod/chgrp/chown jobs -- by now most of the jobs have been rewritten based on GIO and the new ThunarJob framework ... and Thunar still works (for me at least)!
All in all, I suppose that about a third of the implementation work is done. Ok, maybe just a quarter, but an important one. I now have a very good overview over the source code and I'm almost done with one of the most critical parts of the migration.
If you want to know how that looks like for me, here's a screenshot:
These are the most important/big things that are still waiting for me:
- Replace ThunarVFSVolumeManager with GFileMonitor. Volume management is a large and complex subsystem of both ThunarVFS and GIO.
- Load ThunarFile objects asynchronously. This will be a pain. A lot of functions will have to be split up to fit into the asynchronous concept.
- Move the thumbnail related code into exo
These two are a bit out of scope but very important nonetheless:
- Integrate functionality similar to Gigolo (remote/virtual places management) into the file manager.
- Write GNOME-independent GIO extensions for volume management and the trash.
On a side node: Xubuntu 9.04 is available as of today! Go and grab it if you're interested in a nice distro based on Xfce. If you're interested in the Xubuntu development, you'll be able to meet Stephan, several Xubuntu folks and me at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona from May 25th-29th. I'm very excited already!