[CentOS-devel] Fixing up Xfce for CentOS 7

Fri Mar 13 20:42:12 UTC 2015
Anders F Björklund <afb at users.sourceforge.net>

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

>> One more very important thing to note is that EPEL 7 is set to Xfce 4.10 and 4.12 just came fresh out of the oven. If we do A, I'm fairly sure we would need to stick with 4.10 unless the maintainer feels 4.12 upgrade would be possible, then it's a win for option A. The maintainer (or one of them) also maintains a 4.12 copr for F20 so I strongly believe he knows much more about Xfce packaging than me for one. If we do option B we could scrap 4.10 immediately and package 4.12. There is no reason to use 4.10 as a SIG would be the perfect place to get more up-to-date experience on top of stable core.
> 
> You would also be repeating work from various other groups who are doing things in either COPRs or the Fedora XFCE mailing list. Kevin Fenzi (irc:nirik) and Adam Miller (maxamillion) are doing a lot of this work in their spare time. Helping them out would move the following issues a lot.
> 
> 1) A lot of plugins that were in 4.10 and earlier are no longer in 4.12
> 2) A lot of 4.12 was actually built around a gtk3 and tools which aren't in EL-7. 

I would rather see a stable 4.10 release, than adding 4.12 to el7.
It is working fine in Fedora 21 with Rawhide, and is good for F23.

But rebasing the enterprise track, when the basics are still off ?

I mean, we're still trying to see the icons and the background:
http://afb.users.sourceforge.net/xfce/centos/centos7-xfce410.png

Seems like it would be better to fix the default configuration and
the comps at this stage, and do the 4.12 in a COPR or a SCL for now...

And some of the neat things can probably be backported, like Whisker.

> Both of these are actually going to take a lot of work with upstream and the software itself to
> 
> a) make new plugins which work with the 4.12 framework
> b) work on patches or newer upstream releases to make it work with EL-7. 
> 
> Once those are done there looks to be plans to get 4.12 in EL-7. I am hoping to get some time to look at scl's for EL-5 and EL-6 and those would be ones which might do fine with a refresh. 

Or not. The el5 track already saw a breaking release (to 4.6),
and the el6 track could probably do without one (4.8 is fine)...

Once everything 4.12 is working good, one *might* do the rebase.
But gtk3 is *not* a feature, and especially not on the el6 track.


Already had to port LightDM to gtk2, to make it work on EL6 too ?

My guess is that GTK3 is going to be a lot of pain, for Xfce 4.14.
(like with the theme engines, and other stuff dropped "upstream")

And that it could be good to wait until EL8 until suffering it. :-)

--anders