[CentOS-devel] Xfce for CentOS group

[Anders F Björklund]

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

> On 2 February 2015 at 06:07, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote:
>> On 02/01/2015 04:23 PM, Anders F Björklund wrote:
>> >> If you are interested in helping out with testing, packaging or
>> >> developing (backporting, fixing the upstream issues, and so on)
>> >> then please say so. I'll try to have some more detailed lists and
>> >> updated packages with me, for the FOSDEM meetup in the weekend...
>> >
>> > We will continue with our work, and contribute patches to the upstreams.
>> > This includes LightDM for the display manager, using Clearlooks/Adwaita
>> > theme for GTK+ and GNOME icon theme and GNOME background (default.jpg) -
>> > instead of the current Xfce (old, deprecated) or Fedora themes used now.
>> >
>> > Once it is done, and if there is enough interest, it would be possible
>> > for CentOS to work with EPEL in providing a "spin" with Xfce enabled...
>> > Until that time has come, the user will have to continue to do a Base
>> > installation (with X11) and then add the Xfce yum group from EPEL to it.
>> >
>> >
>> > So there won't be any "Xfce for CentOS group". Back to lurking mode. :-)
>> > Hi to everyone I met at FOSDEM, too bad I missed the meeting and dinner.
>> 
>> I am all for this effort .. but who is going to monitor the upstream and
>> back port security issues and the rest.
>> 
>> Just blindly compiling old Fedora RPMs is not going to be helpful if it
>> is insecure.
> 
> The Fedora group watches upstream so I would say that combining there would be the best method. If someone already has a copr for XFCE for EL5,6,7 that is cool but if not I can set one up and if people feed me the fixes needed I can get a unified updated version for those releases.

Well, each track really follows an upstream release and it's within the
normal operation of Fedora EPEL to keep maintaining included packages.
Support for EL5 is a bit questionable, but then again it's nearing the
end of the life cycle anyway so I don't think that is a major concern ?

Possibly Xfce 4.4 should be removed from CentOS Extras, if unmaintained.
i.e. they get replaced by Xfce 4.6 from EPEL5 anyway, if it is enabled.
(actually something of a problem, since there are no such comps in EPEL5
- you get yum groups from Xfce 4.4, but rpm packages from Xfce 4.6...)


AFAIK the mentioned COPR´s serves as a test bed for updates going into
main distribution, and most of it is now available (didn't double-check)
At the moment Xfce SIG is more concerned about the 4.11 / 4.12 release,
but I don't think that is going to affect EPEL releases (until later) ?

http://nonamedotclinux.blogspot.com/2014/02/xfce-411-development-version-repo.html

http://nonamedotclinux.blogspot.com/2014/03/xfce-410-on-epel-7.html
http://nonamedotclinux.blogspot.com/2014/09/second-xfce-410-plugins-copr-repo-for.html

But of course there are some challenges, I only mentioned some of the
simpler branding issues but upstream Xfce does have a few other things
needing the help of developers and EPEL has some unique issues too...
There's a long list at https://www.bountysource.com/teams/xfce/issues


But all of this is going to Fedora, rather than CentOS, following the
rules in <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/GuidelinesAndPolicies>
I have mostly been working in my own git repositories and mock builds
so it needs the proper bugs filed and the proper git patches prepared.

And that takes a lot of time and is rather scary, at least to me... :-)
My main interest is fixing the bugs and ugly, so users stop complaining.
Kojis and COPRs and SIGs, oh my! Maybe I can make a better business case
for it at work, get some colleagues to help me out getting it upstream.

--anders