Meta-port for Goodies

[Olivier Duchateau]

On Tue, 28 Jun 2016 10:50:25 +0200
Ben Woods <woodsb02 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi everyone,

Hi Ben,

> 
> I have submitted a diff to add a meta-port for XFCE Goodies for review here:
> https://reviews.freebsd.org/D6981
> 
> The basic goal of this port is to prevent people installing Xfce and then
> experiencing the following:
> 
>    - Discover they are missing some functionality
>    - Google / Freshport search for the associated port
>    - Install the port
>    - A few days later, discover more missing functionality, etc
> 
> I find on XFCE, there are a number of ports that need to be install before
> you get everything you want. However, given that many of them are panel
> plugins or application, they don't bog down the system unless you actually
> add them to the panel or run them.
> 
> I also find it is hard to discover what other functionality / plugins might
> be available that I don't even realise I am missing. This is especially
> true on FreeBSD because the plugins are in different categories in the
> ports tree, meaning that just because I find the
> x11/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin doesn't mean I am aware that the
> x11-clocks/xfce4-datetime-plugin exists.
> 
> The solution on a number of Linux distros is to provide a xfce-goodies
> meta-port which installs the main applications, panel plugins, thunar
> plugins and artwork that can be found here:
> http://goodies.xfce.org/
> 
> In my proposal, I have also included a few additional ports which are not
> technically part of the Goodies project, but are highly recommended for use
> on an Xfce desktop, and may be hard to discover otherwise. For example,
> until I created this meta-port, I didn't even realise the
> sysutils/xfce4-bsdcpufreq-plugin port existed.
> 
> If you get a chance, please have a look at the review and provide comments.
> 

Not yet review your changes. Personally I'm against (but I'm open with good arguments, or wait the 4.14 release at least). FreeBSD is not a Linux distro (this is recurring requets).
In the past, plugins were not well maintained (switch from 4.8 to 4.10 was painful).

Moreover in ports tree some plugins and applications are obsolete or "broken":

- xfce4-mixer (not anymore maintained by upstream), that's why it's development version in ports tree
- xfce4-print (not anymore maintained by upstream)
- libxfce4gui (considered obsolete by upstream), replaced by libxfce4menu and libxfce4utils
- xfce4-dashboard is broken, it's Clutter's problem (even new stable release, 0.6.0 [1])
- xfce4-wm-themes (not anymore maintained by upstream)
- thunar-vfs (not anymore maintained by upstream)
- squeeze (no update since 8 years)
- xfce4-notification-daemon should be removed (xfce4-notifyd is the only notification daemon supported by upstream)

Vala bindings is not in good shape (it's not your fault).

xfce4-dev-tools is part of Xfce core (it is required if you want to build sources from git clones. It contains M4 macros for autoconf).

Neverless I think for the 4.14 it will be fine, with GTK+3 migration, some unmaintained plugins will be removed and ports tree clean up.

Note: Migration to GTK+3 is coming, the Xfce devel repo already contains the latest unstable releases, and it is up-to-date.

Regards,

[1] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-xfce/2016-May/001353.html

> Regards,
> Ben
> 
> --
> From: Benjamin Woods
> woodsb02 at gmail.com
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-- 
Olivier Duchateau <olivierd at freebsd.org>