lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[PCMan <pcman.tw@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi list,
After observing the reaction of users to the new pcmanfm and gathering
some feedback, I'm now thinking about the necessity to change goals
for 1.0 release.
The major problems encountered by most users seem to be:
1. They don't want gvfs, or if they use it outside gnome, it can be
problematic sometimes.
2. Volume management doesn't work sometimes due to some unknown issue of gvfs.
3. Tree view in the side pane is not available.
4. File searching utility is gone.

So, I'm considering if a revise for 1.0 plan is needed. It's stable in
current status, but it's functionality doesn't match the older series.
This make many people reluctant to upgrade.
The proposed changes to 1.0 are:
1. To implement volume mounting wth udisks and don't completely rely
on gvfs for this.
This won't be too difficult and only requires some coding. This can
make pcmanfm work well without gvfs, which solves #2 and partially
solves #1.
2. Try to add support for tree view to side pane again. I already came
up with a better way to implement it last week. So I'm confident that
this can be done.
3. Leave search utility since it's a Google SoC project now and as the
old one doesn't work correctly, leaving this won't affect much.
4. A developer from the community is trying to work on template
support, so you can create new files based on some template files in
the popup menu. It's still a work in progress, but since it's simple,
can we include this in 1.0?

I want to make an exception for the feature-freeze and add the missing
features udisks and dir tree prior to 1.0. Then it's possible to
totally replace the old pcmanfm with it.
Of course we can do them in branch and leave 1.0 as it is now, but
this may cause problems in promotion and since some old features are
missing, replacing the old series can be more difficult. Missing
features can give the new pcmanfm a bad name sometimes even its
internal structure is much better than the old one.

Any comments?