XFCE 4.8 is Linux only ?

phoenix said:
Now, if we could only get the major desktop developers to look at our wonderful devd.conf(5) system, which has been around far longer than udev, hal, devfs, dev-thingy-of-the-month, and provides all the features needed to make this work.

Of course, they've had almost 10 years to work on this ...
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Perhaps "example" devd.conf files could be provided which cover most basic uses of devd and, potentially (ideally), replace most of the functionality currently handled by the desktop environment? I see no reason why recognizing my game controller, external hard drive, or cell phone should require the intervention of whatever-DE happens to be popular at the moment.

Unfortunately I, personally, don't have the slightest hint of an idea of how to do this.
 
Seems that KDE is thinking the same as XFCE. From the announcement of KDE 4.6:
Code: 
...UPower, UDev and UDisks can be used instead of the deprecated HAL...
 
Why would devd needs to care what desktop/frontend developers do? You basicly configure it on your own and it works, no further work on frontend is needed. Now HAL over dbus does not work like that, frontend actually has to receive the signal and do the mounting/what ever on its own.
 
If Xfce became a Linux-only desktop environment, I will not support it anymore!
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Is a case that we must afraid? What's on Future when KDE and Gnome will take the same way? I don't care of automounting. I don't need a DE to mount something! The first time, I mounted my hdd's, I hadn't even X :p Also, we will still have DE. KDE, GNOME, XFCE. just will not automount. We will mount instead to put flash-see flash. But the point is, if after DE, come also other Linux-only things? Will be a little mess. Also, If I could and I was knowing of programming, I could create a DE only for BSD :) Why, we must handle our Desktop usage on a DE witch all programmers are Linux users if we afraid of incompatibility like now? We have 20000 members and only if 2% of this, wanted, we could create a perfect DE for us! I say that, because I had a mail discussion with a member of this forum. And... Ok. Even Haiku have his own DE. QNX too. Why BSD must follow every Linux fashion? Now is udev instead HAL. In 2 years who knows? Just we could have alternatives for "situations" like this. Is just an idea.
 
fender0107401 said:
If Xfce became a Linux-only desktop environment, I will not support it anymore!
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We move to gnome2-lite, leave too many year's I love .. not just udev... because that signal, x(
 
Meanwhile, XFCE 4.8 works pretty well. The only missing stuff is in the realm of peripheral hardware (e.g. USB sticks) not automounting and showing up on the desktop, PolicyKit (apparently) not working (can't shutdown/reboot as a user anymore), and some flakiness in dual-screen mode. Also Thunar does not seem to auto-refresh directory views when adding/removing files, but that may be a setting somewhere. This may all be related to the back-end changes, but I'm not really deeply into that side of the desktop ;)
 
DutchDaemon said:
Meanwhile, XFCE 4.8 works pretty well. The only missing stuff is in the realm of peripheral hardware (e.g. USB sticks) not automounting and showing up on the desktop, PolicyKit (apparently) not working (can't shutdown/reboot as a user anymore), and some flakiness in dual-screen mode. Also Thunar does not seem to auto-refresh directory views when adding/removing files, but that may be a setting somewhere. This may all be related to the back-end changes, but I'm not really deeply into that side of the desktop ;)
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Well, so I'm considering to update my xfce 4.6 to 4.8 now...
 
You can always try. Keep packages of 4.6 around in case you don't like the result. My very first upgrade was a mess due to an incomplete implementation of one of the auxiliary xfce4 ports (since fixed), and reverting back to 4.6 was easy and painless using the packages.
 
4.8 at my system:

1, waste basket (Trash) is missing
2, java-swt's project (eclipse 3.4 tested) clipboard don't complete work (must press "copy" 2 time)
3, USB sticks plugin not notify

but shutdown/reboot works, just create some conf file in the
Code: 
/usr/local/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/
, see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xfce#Xfce_4.8

I think the signal tell us, more features (or compatibility) to be lost at next version. So I give up like 'he' gives up on us.
 
Seems that xfce4.6 will be the last xfce for BSD, Solaris etc but at least will exist. Maybe we will not have the latest xfce but thinking possitive we will have the possibility of a workable xfce :)
 
So, as this goes, I just wonder how many users of Xfce in *BSD will be in the next year or further future? Less and less?
 
This will be an interesting one.

A decent solution would be for an older (fully working) version to remain existing in the FreeBSD ports... However that isn't going to be the case is it? Instead a slightly broken 4.8 will be put there and we will be down one complete Desktop Environment as it becomes more and more broken and linux specific.

Xfce really is starting to become too bloated so a FreeBSD specific fork should be made.. Unfortunately xfce4 is too complex to keep maintaining.. It is a lose-lose situation :p

</badly_argued_rant>
 
xfce isn't broken, they just stopped supporting a widely-hated and deprecated-for-years hal. Which happened to be all that was available on FreeBSD.

What parts of xfce don't work on FreeBSD? The only thing I've noticed is that memory sticks aren't auto-mounted, and there are other mechanisms for that.

This is one of the prices users pay for running a less-popular operating system. The options are to live with it, find alternatives like devd(8) and amd(8), or port the competing interface (udev).
 
wblock said:
This is one of the prices users pay for running a less-popular operating system.
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There is also, of course, a price to pay for running one of the more popular operating systems.

All things considered, I'll stick with FreeBSD.
 
aragon said:
I wonder how complex it'd be to have Xfce support devd instead of udev? Then again, I've been needing a push to finally try LXDE...
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Warner Losh has offered to make a udev-alike implementation. I've been collecting links and information to try to help, but it's not easy and not something that will happen in the short term.

I've got a little script called from devd that automounts media. Unmounting it is more difficult, or at least providing a neat way to do so like adding an entry to the right-click context menu for devices on the desktop.

The only other features missing, AFAIK, are the Shutdown/Reboot/Logout requester that doesn't show. I think, anyway, haven't tested that much. The right commands are already in xfsm-shutdown-helper, but xfce used to use hal to run them as root. It shouldn't be too hard to patch around this; ignore hal, try to run those commands directly, and require that the user be in the operator group.

It might be relatively easy to create FreeBSD-specific patches for these problems if one has some clue how xfce works internally. (I don't, yet.)
 
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