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

[Andrei Popescu]

On Sat,04.Apr.09, 14:29:43, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
 
> > 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)
 
KDE has kpackage.

> > 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 :/)

What do you think about ayttm?
 
> > (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.)

#522498

> > 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.

It's fine with me, I just wanted to point out that some formats not 
unusual on Linux (.ps and .dvi) are not supported.

> > 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. 

I'm running 4.6 since a few hours ;) The "could not open file" message 
is gone, but all other points are still valid, even if they are only 
related to usability. I'll file whishlist bugs upstream when I get 
around it.

> > 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.

Yes, together with iceweasel and openoffice.org :/ Do you think people 
would oppose removing the stuff from the desktop task and let every DE 
chose for itself?

> > 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.

More than the entire OpenOffice.org?

> > 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.

Sounds ok. Maybe midori will get more audience this way (which might 
help fix some bugs).

BTW, how can I make a useful bugreport about the random crashes I've 
seen?

Regards,
Andrei
-- 
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
(Albert Einstein)
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