On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 6:42 PM, Anders F Björklund <afb@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

This seems like a good idea (providing the COPR), but apparently this (Xfce in EPEL) handled by the Xfce SIG rather than the EPEL SIG. Or perhaps both of the Fedora SIGs at once, but at any rate it's not in CentOS Extras.

This is why Xfce SIG would be nice. To get people together.

Putting the packages in a COPR was how it was handled last year, and it seems that it didn't work out perfectly ? But perhaps with some more awareness and documentation, it could be a better and more stable option.

This is where the Xfce SIG could do that when people get the 4.10 experience by default from EPEL and if you want newer you could use a specific COPR/repo for that. I'm fairly sure people didn't use nonamedotc's COPR because they didn't know it and *personal* COPRS don't boast stableness but a SIG COPR/repo would in my eyes. Even though nonamedotc is one of the maintainers it's still a personal repo and he is probably not committed to keep such very updated and supported.

I'm not using nonamedotc's 4.12 COPR because I wasn't aware of it before you told me off-list this a few days ago and instead waited for F22 packages to go into testing so I could pull them from there. Awareness is the key here as you said.

Xfce got off to a slow start, since EPEL-7 was still in beta when CentOS-7 came out. But I wouldn't say it's in a bad shape now, and it already had a pretty good Xfce 4.10 experience even with the Fedora 18 packages.

Most of the remaining problems are the same for all of el5-el6-el7, and it's about the completeness of the packaging (the rpms and the comps). And possibly doing some branches and rebuilds, of the missing packages.

I've rebuilt ristretto, mousepad and the patched xfdesktop and xfce4-settings in a testing COPR and they seem to be fine. Also xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin as you told worked wonders so everything should be rather easy to get going.

We have something like 90% on EL6, and 10% on EL5. But only 1% (testing) EL7. So it is more interesting to fix the existing releases, and that doesn't need any Xfce rebases. New fancy stuff from Fedora isn't needed at all, more like rebuilds/branches of old stuff that is missing from EPEL. It would be better to use some mechanism like SCL for add-ons, and keep the mainline at the current Xfce releases. The EL "rebases" *always* seem to break stuff.

The COPR/repo approach for 4.12 seems good . The SIG can spread the awareness of it and maybe have an easy-to-install package (like epel-release is) to easily switch from 4.10 to 4.12 if such is maintained.

There was some talk about an "Alternative Desktops" SIG for CentOS last year, but there wasn't enough interest or volunteers to form a group. Then we tried to narrow it down to just a "Xfce Desktop" group, but in the end that came down to "so just use EPEL". But maybe a spin is a nice focal point, then the packaging can continue in EPEL and the CentOS Xfce SIG can just offer a special ISO with the epel-release and @xfce-desktop already added to it.

Basically I just want a better Xfce user experience, not join a club. ;-)

If there are not enough people to form the club, we just work with EPEL. But we don't get any semi-official Xfce spins out in the open without having a SIG I suppose.

Looks like forming a SIG is such a big thing people are put off by it?

Toni Spets