Features/Xfce46

Feature Name

Xfce46

Summary

Update Xfce to the upstream 4.6 release with many new improvements and features.

Owner

• Name: Kevin Fenzi

• email: kevin@tummy.com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 11
• Last updated: 2009-01-19
• Percentage of completion: 75%

Detailed Description

The Xfce project has been working on a new version, 4.6 for quite a while now. Currently they have a Beta2 release available. The final release is currently estimated around Feb 6th, 2009. This should give time for polishing and bugfixing before F11 is released. Additionally, a dist-f11-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. Beta3 is now available, and I am working on packaging and updating to those package versions.

Benefit to Fedora

Xfce 4.6 has a number of improvements and new features. A few of the more notable ones:

• new libxfce4menu that follows the freedesktop.org menu standards
• new Xconf configuration system, which replaces the mcs system in use since 4.0.0
• new settings dialogs
• many bugfixes and enhancements to xfdesktop, including monitor hot plugging support.
• new xfce4-mixer with support for pulseaudio and multiple sound cards.

Scope

Existing packages will need to be updated to 4.6 in rawhide. Three new packages have been reviewed and will need to be imported:

• DONE: libxfce4menu - See review bug: Bugzilla: 477839
• DONE: xfconf - See review bug: Bugzilla: 477732
• DONE: xfce4-settings - See review bug: Bugzilla: 47799

Five packages will need to be Obsoleted and blocked from F11:

• libxfce4mcs
• xfce-mcs-manager
• xfce-mcs-plugins
• xfce-mcs-plugins-extra
• xfce-mcs-plugin-gsynaptics

These packages implement or use the old mcs configuration. All packages are correctly obsoleted by xfconf-4.5.93 (2009-01-19).

How To Test

New installs:

• install rawhide/F11 on any machine.
• yum groupinstall 'XFCE'
• 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.
• confirm xfce4-mixer starts and can manage any sound card(s).

(More specifics can be added when final changelogs are available)

User Experience

Users should see additional functionality and features available from the Xfce desktop.

Dependencies

In addition to the core Xfce packages, all the xfce plugins packages will need to be rebuild and updated. Work will be coordinated with the plugins maintainer.

Contingency Plan

Revert to older Xfce 4.4 version. This may require a Epoch and rebuilding packages and plugins. Or if the dist-f11-xfce tag has not yet been merged back into rawhide, only reverts in cvs will be required.

Documentation

http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.6/general-info

http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.6/milestones

http://www.xfce.org/about/news?id=18

http://www.xfce.org/about/news?id=16

http://www.xfce.org/about/news?id=15

Release Notes

Xfce has been updated to version 4.6. This version includes many enhancements and bug fixes.

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/Xfce46

---