[CentOS-devel] Fixing up Xfce for CentOS 7

On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 6:42 PM, Anders F Björklund <
afb at 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
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