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Schedule for and Status of the Xfce 4.10 Development Cycle

Schedule

This schedule is preliminary and not to be considered final.

Read the Xfce Release Model to understand why this cycle is the way it is.

Dates Phase/Deadline Everyone's Tasks Release Team Tasks Maintainer Tasks
2011-01-17 - 2011-01-31 Planning Phase Elect the release team, discuss dependencies Make a realistic list of planned features
2011-02-01 - 2011-02-13 Extended Planning Phase May request dependency changes
2011-02-13 Dependency Freeze Update dependency info, inform community about the decisions made (dependencies, unguaranteed feature preview)
2011-02-13 - 2012-04-01 Development Phase Support Xfce Supervise development, remind people of deadlines Hacking
2012-04-01 - 2012-04-28 Release Phase Wait patiently Perform releases, remind people of deadlines Perform releases of own components if desired
2012-04-01 Xfce 4.10pre1 (Feature Freeze + Soft String Freeze) Prepare release announcements, release Xfce 4.10pre1 Make sure the latest development release is in good shape and uploaded. Try to avoid making string changes since this release will most likely skip pre3!
2012-04-14 Xfce 4.10pre2 (String + Code Freeze) Prepare release announcements, release Xfce 4.10pre2 Make sure that strings in the latest development release or in master are good
2012-04-28 or 1 week later Xfce 4.10 (Final Release) Celebrate Prepare release announcements, release Xfce 4.10, branch for stable release, merge ELS branches into master Make sure to upload a new release of own components before this deadline

Status

Release Team

Release Manager Nick Schermer
QA Official Jannis Pohlmann
Release Assistant Jérôme Guelfucci
Release Assistant Yves-Alexis Perez
Release Assistant Jannis Pohlmann

People can still apply for those positions.

Dependencies (Fixed After 2011-01-25)

  • gtk+-2.0 >= 2.20 1)
    • Same version for gdk-pixbuf-2.0 and gdk-2.0.
  • glib-2.0 >= 2.24 2)
    • Same version for gmodule-2.0, gobject-2.0, gthread-2.0 and gio-2.0
  • cairo >= 1.6 3)
  • dbus-glib-1 >= 0.84 4)
    • dbus-1 >= 1.1
  • libwnck-1.0 >= 2.30 5)
  • upower >= 0.9.0 for Xfce4-power-manager.
  • consolekit (through DBus in xfce4-session).

Roadmap / Planned Features

About Gtk+ 3.0 and compilation with GSEAL

As discussed on the xfce4-dev mailing list; Xfce 4.10 will depend on Gtk+ 2.20 and won't be ported to Gtk+ 3.0 until after the 4.10 release. Reason for this is that both Gtk+ 3.0 is not fully stable when 4.10 entered the development stage and because in 4.8 the porting to GIO/libxfce4ui/polkit/consolekit took more time then expected, so this this release is all about polishing and focus on what matters to users.

This means it is not required to support compilation with GSEAL; simply because the public functions are not complete in Gtk+ 2.20 and not required 6) to make Xfce work with newer Gtk+ 2 versions.

Features that Affect the Entire Xfce Core

Modules

Please don't take the features listed on these pages as obligatory. Keep in mind that they may or may not make it into the 4.10 release, depending on the time the individual developers have.

New modules in core. This was decided because the modules reduce the complexity in Xfce (Xfpm) or are common for a fully functional desktop (Tumbler and Volman). Garcon should've been in 4.8 core, if not only to avoid confusion users currently have.

Changes in Dependencies

  • Libxfce4util soname changed.
  • Garcon has a new libxfce4util dependency. 69884
  • Exo has a new libxfce4ui dependency. a8c1b
  • Libxfce4util only depends on glib (was gobject). 09e3bc
  • Xfce-utils is not needed anymore. Functionality has been moved in xfce4-session, libxfce4ui, xfce-docs or removed. See xfce-utils roadmap page for the details.
  • Xfce4-session does not (optionally) depend on xfce4-panel anymore. The plugin has been integrated with the actions xfce4-panel plugin. 539589
  • Xfce4-session does not check for consolekit, hal, upower and polkit. It has soft dependencies on consolekit and upower (communication over DBus).
  • Xfce4-session does not optionally depend on gconf anymore. f483ee.
1)
Higher versions don't provide any new features we require; it will be supported by most distributions; ~2 years old when 4.10 is released.
2) , 3)
Minimum version for Gtk+ 2.20.
4) , 5)
Released around the same date as Gtk+ 2.20
6)
This means we are not accepting patches to replace GSEAL-ed API with new functions that are supported by the minimal Gtk+ dependency for this release. It brings no benefit at all, in fact it is probably a tiny bit slower, and unneeded changes make cherry-picking from the master branch to the 4.8 branches more difficult.