Edscott sent some comments about Thunar development to thunar-dev today, with similar contents like a mail he sent me previously some time ago. It’s seldomly the case in conversation with Edscott, but with these mails there’s really nothing I could say against or in addition. He’ll most probably be either flamed or ignored for his mail, tho.
In the meantime, I worked on some ideas for the backend code (I’m still thinking to use GnomeVFS instead if this turns out to get too complicated, because there’s no valid reason to reinvent a tricky wheel):
I decided that development on Thunar as part of Xfce will continue, but with some limitations, which will help to keep the fun with the project.
Now that were two really busy months - april and may - for me (up to 300 hours each), and it was a necessary break from Xfce for me. Somehow I lost not only my interest in Xfce, but more important, it was no longer fun for me. To me it looked (and still looks) like Xfce development is going into the wrong direction. I’m not yet sure if and how I will continue my contribution to Xfce. I started to do some long standing stuff for libexo/thunar yesterday. But reading the last suggestions on thunar-dev made me think that there’s no need for a simple file manager in Xfce. Maybe Xfce people should extend Xffm even more, rather than developing a second not-simple file manager.
So, CeBIT 2005 is over and - as usual - the result is: A lot of work. Very interesting work, tho. But it leaves me with no time for xfce (besides that, my energy level is near to zero when I return home). I don’t even manage to read all my mail currently.
Speaking from the recent mail subjects on the xdg list, work is going on with D-VFS and there seems to be another attempt to standardize the icon names for icon themes, which is a very, very good thing.
On the thunar front, there seems to be a lot of discussion concerning a different name (I haven’t read all the mails, still 23 unread mails in thunar-dev, but from those I read, I’d say Thunar is still the best name), and Benjamin Cohen came up with a patch for auto-completion for the prototype, I’ll look into this tomorrow.
A quick look at the OSNews poll tells me, that Thunar wins again with 11% (and 89 comments is quite a lot for an Xfce sub project, that did not release a single line of code). Besides that, when will people realize that it’s Xfce not XFce? ;-)
That’s all for the day, my bed awaits me…
The name discussion started once again. Most popular seems to be:
- Secretary
- Nomad
- PathFinder
- Digger
for now. Personally, I still prefer Thunar for the reasons described in this mail.
On a related note: Thunar was on OSNews already (why did nobody tell me?), and people commented on the Suggestion 20050320. I tried to get some useful information out of the comments, but it’s hard to decide what’s useful and what not (the slashdot syndrome). It’d be better if people would suggest/comment stuff on thunar-dev instead.