Road to Xfce 4.14, part 2

on xfce

More than 1 year since my latest blogpost… wow !
Lots of activities these last months, on code and infra side :)
But the good news is that we had done a lots of background tasks (see the Infrastructure section) !

As you might know, Xfce 4.14 is a transitionnal release, where the main goal is to port all components to GTK+3.

GTK+3 minimum version has been bumped to version 3.20 (and maybe 3.22), because of so much changes since gtk 3.14 (broken themes, css), this will remove a lot of ifdef maze and code complexity to support several gtk versions. By the time of 4.14 release, all major distributions will have gtk>3.20.

You can check the status of all currents efforts on the wiki. Please check this page before starting a GTK+3 port, maybe it’s already done but not yet on master !

Core

Almost all core components have now a gtk+3 version (yai !), with developement releases lately ! Here a small summary :

In the help wanted section, AndreLDM is currently working on Thunar gtk+3 port ! If you have gtk/gdk/cairo knowledges, any contributor is welcome ! Contact us on #xfce-dev irc channel (freenode) or xfce4-dev mailist.

Ochosi made some great blog posts on all activities theses last months, (xfce4-notifyd, panel, taskmanager, clipman), stay tuned on https://blog.xfce.org/ !

Xfce Apps

In the xfce apps world, please notice the work on xfce4-terminal , with a complete port to gtk+3 in 0.8 (+ get rid of the old and insecure vte 0.28), new features and more : https://git.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-terminal/tree/NEWS .

This work will be available in the future Debian Stretch! Thanks to Igor for his hard work !

You can also notice the GTK+3 port of xfce4-screenshooter by AndreLDM.

Xfce Panel plugins

On the panel plugins side, tons of new releases, I can’t list all of them - netload, clipman, datetime, cpufreq etc - with of course a bunch of gtk3 ports, thanks to all of our contributors.

Look at the https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce-announce/ mailist to see the work done.

I also updated the xfce4-sample-plugin which can be used as a base if you want to start a new panel plugin !

Tests

If you want to test the current state of Xfce 4.14, you can look at xfce-test, a docker image by Florian which allow you to test git master and to run behave (behaviour-driven development) ! -okay sometimes it’s b0rken-

Ochosi wrote a small blog post about this docker image last month.

Here a screenshot of a git master build (a.k.a : xfce 4.14) :

xfce-test

Infrastructure

Almost all the infrastructure problems we had by the time of my last blog post have been fixed.

Thanks to gaston, user repositories are now working, and all services are now HTTPS enabled (with let’s encrypt) ! Youhou !

Moreover, since a few month, I try to take care of the Xfce servers infrastructure. Here a small summary of latest actions.

Git / Bugzilla

  • Enabling syntax highlighting on cgit web interface ! Based on python fragment, it detect c/h files, see https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-power-manager/tree/panel-plugins/power-manager-plugin/power-manager-button.c as an example.
  • Bug number catch in commit message to highlight them in cgit and link to the related bugzilla issue ! It catch several patterns like Bug #xxxx or bug xxxx. Developers, please use it ! :) bz issue catch
  • Speaking of bug number, a new git hook is in place, it parse the git commit message, detect if there is a bug number referenced, and automatically posts commits references to bugzilla ! An example: https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12159#c4 ! This is a really cool new feature (thanks ochosi for the idea). It’s not perfect and it need more works, but it is now available on all repositories ! bz gitbot
  • The famous “Bug 12117 - The default desktop startup screen causes damage to monitor!” got a lot of attention (x10 in traffic!) last March on reddit, hackernews, fefes.de and killed our poor bugzilla instance ! (thanks mod_perl :] ). Here are some visitor stats, see the difference…
  • A new bugzilla template/theme by knome is available, with a lot of improvements ! You can enable it in your account preferences. It’s still a work in progress but should be released as the default theme soon bugzilla theme
  • Upgrade to latest cgit version (1.1)

Website

Maybe you already seen it, but the https://xfce.org website got a nice revamp with a more modern code/css, and is now responsive. Many thanks to knome, you can read his blog post which contain more informations :)

Misc

  • http://geoip.xfce.org (used by the weather plugin to auto-detect the user localization) has been updated and should be more accurate. It is also available in https.
  • The wiki engine (dokuwiki) and plugins used on wiki.x.o, docs.x.o and goodies.x.o, has been updated to latest release.
  • The forum engine has been updated.
  • Some obsoletes/outdated subdomains now redirect to the main xfce.org website (xfc.x.o, squeeze.x.o, thunar.x.o, foundation.x.o etc)
  • The wiki now use an invisible captcha and not an ugly one like previously.
  • Tons of Infrastructure bugs opened on our bugzilla has been fixed.

Enjoy,