One wouldn’t imagine how difficult it can be to copy/move files around. You can come up with cp/mv hacks within a few minutes. But doing it right, with user interaction, trash support, percentage/EST calculation and all the good stuff (threaded of course, and esp. without risking data loss on the user’s side), seems to be surprisingly difficult. I guess it’s time to stand up from the computer and do something else.
In other news, there’s Mickael posting about Xfce is KDE done the right way, based on one of Jaspers screenshots: I doubt that Xfce will ever attract the average KDE user. There ain’t enough bells and whistles in Xfce, or - to quote a colleague - Xfce just works. KDE users are a bit like Mac Classic users: It doesn’t matter that much if something doesn’t work properly (they’ll figure out how to ignore the problem), but everything must be cute and cuddly. And personally, I wouldn’t want to see Xfce turning into that direction.
It’s wednesday already. Managed to finish my last math exam successfully this week and now I’m planning for my birthday party next saturday.
There’s not much to tell from the Thunar front. I hope to have a release version ready by the end of the month, which will be imported into the Xfce SVN repository then, but no promises. Not sure if we can really release 4.4.0 this year, atleast its questionable for Thunar. But on the other hand, that shouldn’t be a problem, as long as we manage to release prior to 20060116. And dropping Thunar from Xfce 4.4.0 now that we told everybody that it will be included with 4.4 won’t work.
As always, whats needed the most is time.
While testing some volume manager related stuff, I tried to load a large folder from a CD-ROM (the i386 folder from one of my more or less unused Windows 2000 install CDs, which contains about 4000 files) into the tree view and it took forever, even after the folder content was visible (I suspect this is GtkTreeView loading icon data for the invisible items, tho haven’t checked yet). And of course, since currently everything runs in the main thread, the GUI was blocked.
While I was aware of this problem, I decided to ignore it so far. On the solution side, we have basicly two possibilities: First we can do everything asynchronously or secondly we can do the fast stuff synchronously and add a “media://”-implementation, which does its work asynchronously (if somebody has a slow NFS-mount, he won’t have fun with most probably every other program either, so we can safely ignore this case and focus on removable media). The first option is actually what I did for the very first prototypes and it turned out to be complex (I don’t want to force everything into a limited low-level API like Gnome-VFS does, and so the high-level stuff would need to be thread-safe) and slow. The second option looks better to me, although it’s still a lot of work to implement ThunarFolder and ThunarFile in a thread-safe way.
I just removed xfce4-tips from the xfce4-toys package, since it’s now included with xfce4-session. Now the question is: Where to move the eyes plugin to (which is the only component left in xfce4-toys)? We have basicly three options:
- Move it to xfce4-panel
- Turn it into a separate goodie
- Drop it (if Danny do not want to maintain it anymore)
Since we’re now using desktop files instead of arbitrary scripts or symlinks, it is pretty easy to make the list of autostarted applications editable through a simple user interface. And so here’s xfce4-autostart-editor:
xfce4-autostart-editor is now part of xfce4-session (trunk, rev 16232). I’m looking for an icon - or atleast an idea about how such an icon could look like - for this tool (unfortunately Francois is away).