Feature Freeze approaching

[Steve Dodier]

Hello folks,
Feature freeze is going to occur in 11 days from now, which leaves little
time to take decisions about the applications and features we want in
Xubuntu Karmic. Several specs have been written, about default applications,
but unfortunately two of them have not been followed by any action/decision
so far (image viewer / mail client).

I don't think it would be easy to organise a team meeting with the presence
of the 3 core developers, so maybe we can discuss these specs in this
thread, so that Cody, Lionel and Michael can decide whether we should change
these applications or not before Feature Freeze, and update the
xubuntu-desktop seed accordingly.

*Default Image Viewer*

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Specifications/Karmic/DefaultImageViewer

As we know, Stephan (developer of Ristretto) is re-designing Ristretto's
features prior to writing it's next release, so we can consider the current
upstream release as the final one for Karmic (unless we spot critical bugs /
unwanted behaviour and take upon ourselves to write a patch for it). Maybe
Stephan can tell us more about what is expected for Ristretto in the
following weeks. Ristretto is slightly heavier than Gpicvieww, but it does
have more features, and if we change, we can also bring a bigger userbase to
Ristretto, thus helping finding (and fixing) bugs. On a purely distro point
of view, this would allow us to provide our users with a more stable and
feature rich image viewer for our next LTS.

*Default Mail Client*

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Specifications/Karmic/DefaultImageViewer

I'm not using mail clients at all, so I don't have an opinion about this,
but it would be good to make a choice about the mail client. All I can say
is that I don't think we will be able to do anything else than providing
these applications "as-is" for this release. I'm not even confident about
possible libindicate support, since the upstream libindicate developers
still didn't separate libindicate from indicator-applet (which depends on
GNOME). This also means we probably won't be able to get
indicator-applet-xfce in Karmic. The next release being an LTS, I think
Karmic could be a release of choice for introducing such changes and for
getting user feedback, though.

*Default Power Manager*


There is no spec for this one so far, but are we able to tell what we want
to do on Xfce4-power-manager in order to use it for Karmic ? Cody's been
working on RAM usage, what else is lacking ? I'll try to find time for
improving battery notifications to something such as lp #399492. We're also
lacking PolicyKit support, as far as I understand. I don't think this is a
realistic goal for Karmic, but is someone willing to work on it for Karmic+1
?

*GDM, gnome-screensaver*


What are we doing about these ? I don't believe we want to depend on
gnome-session, but it is really time to decide about what to use as a
replacement for these two applications (and whether we can use something
unsecure / ugly and fix the security flaws / GUI).

*NotifyOsd*

*https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Specifications/Karmic/NotifyOsd*
*This is mostly done; I have working code for xfconf support, and for text
size / bubble colour customization. It will only be lacking a GUI, because I
just don't have the time for it, but I believe this should be feasible in
Karmic+1. By the meanwhile, I will take the time to write a wiki page about
how to customize NotifyOsd's appearence, and commands to turn the white on
black to some tooltip-like look and feel. I am very sorry, Charlie, for not
being able to write a GUI for it right now. I didn't expect to not code at
all for two weeks because of personal life agitation.*

*I may have forgotten stuff about what needs to be addressed for feature
freeze, feel free to add it to the conversation.*

-- 
Steve Dodier
OpenPGP : 1B6B1670
IRC : SiDi on irc.freenode.net
Jabber : sidi at im.apinc.org
steve.dodier at gmail.com
https://launchpad.net/~sidi
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