After we successfully released Xfce 4.16 as an early Christmas gift to all users last year I personally fell into the typical “post release fatigue” (PRF). On the one hand I was exhausted, on the other hand that’s how far our plans had taken us so there were no clear next steps we had settled on (apart from taking a break and recharging :)).
So what’s been going on since then…
Xfce 4.16 maintenance
First of all, we’ve done quite a few maintenance release of 4.16 to ensure it’s stability. We already provided lots of bugfix releases of 4.14 – some even very recently (Desktop, Appfinder) – but it looks like 4.16 may end up being (at least: among) the best maintained Xfce release so far.
Thunar is probably the active component with a 6th patch release being available already. Here goes an overview of all patch releases since 4.16.0 in December 2020:
- Thunar: 4.16.1, 4.16.2, 4.16.3, 4.16.4, 4.16.5, 4.16.6
- Panel: 4.16.1, 4.16.2
- Xfwm4: 4.16.1
- Garcon: 4.16.1
- Appfinder: 4.16.1
Developer documentation
In order to improve documentation for developers and make it more readily available we have started developer.xfce.org. For now this site hosts the API documentation of most relevant core components. This documentation is automatically kept up-to-date as part of our GitLab CI for the xfce/xfce-build Docker container and re-deployed on every week based on the latest 4.16 release tags.
Furthermore, we improved the shell-based helper scripts for developers, e.g. xfce-build (to locally run distcheck in the same Docker container used in our CI) with subcommands.
Task manager
I have fixed some bugs and done maintenance releases of the 1.4 series and started the 1.5 development series, which features a port of Task manager to Xfconf and Client-side decorations.