Xfce 4.8
Summary
Update Xfce to the upstream 4.8 release with many new improvements and features.
Owners
- Names: Kevin Fenzi, Christoph Wickert
- email: kevin@tummy.com, cwickert@fedoraproject.org
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 13
- Last updated: 2010-01-11
- Percentage of completion: 0%
Detailed Description
The Xfce project has been working on a new version, 4.8 for quite a while now.
The Xfce 4.8 development schedule is currently estimated to be very close the schedule of Fedora 13.
| Date | Xfce | Fedora |
|---|---|---|
| 2010-02-01 | Xfce 4.8pre1 | |
| 2010-02-09 | Feature Freeze | |
| 2010-02-16 | Alpha Freeze | |
| 2010-03-01 | Xfce 4.8pre2 | |
| 2010-03-02 | Alpha Release | |
| 2010-03-23 | Beta Freeze | |
| 2010-03-29 | Xfce 4.8pre3 | |
| 2010-04-06 | Beta Release | |
| 2010-04-12 | Xfce 4.8final | |
| 2010-04-27 | Final Freeze | |
| 2010-04-29 | Compose Release Candidate | |
| 2010-05-11 | F13 Release |
This means:
- We only have 8 days from the release of Xfce 4.8pre1 till Feature Freeze. If release is delayed, we might need to drop the feature as it needs to be in a testable state for feature freeze.
- Fedora 13 Alpha will come with Xfce 4.8pre1 (15 days from release to Alpha freeze)
- Fedora 13 Beta will come with Xfce 4.8pre2 (22 days from release to Beta freeze)
- Fedora 13 RC will come with Xfce 4.8final (17 days from release to RC compose)
Additionally, a dist-f13-xfce tag will be used to coordinate the package builds, so impact on rawhide will be minimal until the full set of packages is ready to land at once.
Benefit to Fedora
Xfce 4.8 has a number of improvements and new features. A few of the more notable ones:
- Xfce menu will support menu merging.
- Bring back the graphical menu editor known from Xfce 4.4
- Multilib enhancements for xfce4-panel plugins.
Scope
Existing packages will need to be updated to 4.8 in rawhide. Four new packages have been reviewed and will need to be imported:
- garcon: Implementation of the freedesktop.org menu specification.
- tumbler: D-Bus service for applications to request thumbnails for various URI schemes and MIME types. Review request at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=549593
- libxfce4ui: Commonly used Xfce widgets.
Two packages will need to be Obsoleted and blocked from F13:
- libxfce4menu (replaecd by garcon)
- libxfcegui4 (replaced by libxfce4ui)
How To Test
New installs:
- install rawhide/F11 on any machine.
- yum install @xfce-desktop
- confirm gdm offers Xfce4 as a session type
- confirm you can select this session and login
- confirm settings changes can be made and saved, and are found after a logout/login cycle.
- confirm day to day desktop functions are working.
- confirm all settings dialogs come up and work.
(More specifics can be added when final changelogs are available)
Updates:
- confirm yum groupupdate 'XFCE' works and all packages are properly updated/obsoleted.
- confirm the updated desktop works fine.
Contingency Plan
Revert to older Xfce 4.6 version. This may require a Epoch and rebuilding packages and plugins. Or if the dist-f13-xfce tag has not yet been merged back into rawhide, only reverts in cvs will be required.
Release Notes
- Xfce has been updated to version 4.8. This version includes many enhancements and bug fixes. See the tour at http://www.xfce.org/about/tour for more information.