[Pkg-xfce-devel] Discussion of xfce desktop task for d-i

[Yves-Alexis Perez]

On sam, 2009-04-04 at 11:01 +0300, Andrei Popescu wrote:

> 1. No icon on the desktop for removable drives due to missing 'hal'. I
> understand this is pending so probably doesn't need more discussion.

Yes, Squeeze Xfce desktop will definitely bring hal.
> 
> 2. GUI package manager: I prefer aptitude for myself, but a GUI one is
> definitely necessary and synaptic is the obvious choice (at least until
> aptitude-gtk is ready, when the discussion can be reopened)

I'm not really against a package manager in the default install, I'm
just don't sure if it should be in desktop or xfce-desktop. Is there a
KDE package manager? Because there is no xfce specific package manager
(well, besides xfce4-smartpm-plugin which is not yet uploaded and may
never be)
> 
> 3. IM client: my first thought was pidgin, but seeing that it wants to
> install 20 additional packages I reconsidered. After a quick search I
> found ayttm, which at the first glance seems quite usable.

Yeah, a default install kind-of require that, agreed. Pidgin is nice and
doesn't require that many packages. But it requires gconf so it's not
really a good idea (though we already use gdm in that install, so we
already have it :/)
> 
> (edit: one quirk about ayttm is that you can't write to people who are 
> "offline", even if that person is in fact only "invisible" and just 
> wrote you something. I'll file a bug.)
> 
> 4. Document viewer: epdfview makes a good pdf viewer. OTOH, evince-gtk
> supports additional formats (ps, eps, djvu and dvi)...

evince-gtk is gone (the only rationale for evince-gtk was to drop the
dep on libgnome, which evince has not anymore, but it still depends on
libgnome-keyring and gconf). For me I'd prefer epdfview, even if it's a
bit rhough.
> 
> 5. Image viewer: my personal preference is gpicview. Xavier Oswald
> suggested mirage which could also be an option. Ristretto is currently 
> not very usable, IMHO, but this could change.

Could you retry the 0.21 version in unstable (and maybe report the bugs
we talked about upstream). Mirage is nice but ristretto (which started
as a mirage fork iirc) is an Xfce project, so it'd be consistent. 
> 
> 6. Image editor: gimp is installed by default, but is seems a bit heavy
> to me (well, at least having an image viewer will mean it's not opened
> by default if I double-click an image) and would suggest something like
> gpaint.
> 
> (edit: it seems the default for KDE is kolourpaint, which according to 
> the description is (much?) simpler than Gimp)

But gimp is brought by the desktop task, not by xfce-desktop task.
> 
> 7. Productivity: openoffice.org is pulled by the generic Desktop task
> (AFAICT). For me personally this is a bit heavy an I would rather only
> have Abiword+Gnumeric.

But abiword and gnumeric are gnome apps, they'll bring to many stuff I
guess.
> 
> and a point raised by Yves-Alexis:
> 
> 8. www browser:
> 
> > One stuff I'll have to think about, too, is the browser. I'd be glad to
> > drop iceweasel for midori once webkit is stabilized (especially since
> > midori is now officially some kind of an xfce project) but maybe the
> > user expects iceweasel to be there on a desktop task. That or we could
> > drop it from the desktop task and let every *-task define the preferred
> > brother (epiphany/konqueror/midori/=E2=80=A6)
> 
> (edit: AFAICT KDE and Gnome are using Konqueror and Epiphany by default, 
> even if Iceweasel is present)

So I guess we could add midori to the list (and make it the default
where possible), but still keep iceweasel in the desktop task.

Cheers,
-- 
Yves-Alexis
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