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edscott

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From: Dodging bullets in Mexico

Registered: 2011-04-01

Posts: 5

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A bit of Rodent (Xffm) history.

A bit of Rodent (Xffm) history.

Going back in time, Xfce started as a CDE clone. CDE was the "Common Desktop Environment" developed by HP, Sun, Digital and other big box players for their top notch workstations. Definitely cool. Definitely not for dummies.

CDE had a neat filemanager called dtfile, but this was not open source, so Xfce used a variation of Rasca's "Xtree" called "Xftree" as a filemanager. I entered the show by extending Xftree's functionality with the "glob" search engine (now "fgr"), the samba network browser "Xfsamba", the differences viewer "Xfdiff" and a set of dtfile icons, among other things.

Then came the migration to GTK-2. For this Xftree was rewritten as Xffm, retaining all the previous functionality and adding more. The dtfile icon set was replaced by Francois' Rodent icon theme. To distinguish Xffm as a part of Xfce, the first release was tagged 4.0.

Then came 4.2 and the love/hate story started. Those new to Xfce could not understand why Xffm had such a steep learning curve, while those familiar to Xftree expected the nerdy behaviour they had become used to.

Anyways, it was decided that Xfce would no longer distribute a filemanager: this way users could choose the new Thunar filemanager (which, as an independent software, would no longer follow the Xfce version numbers).

Cut loose of the xfce umbilical, xffm was adopted by foo-projects, hosted at Stockholm University. The xffm.org domain was assigned and the web page at http://xffm.org/ was put on the line. The next release of Xffm would no longer follow the Xfce version numbers, but for consistency would not be rolled back.

Xffm-4.5.0, which featured a new user interface (although the old nerdy treeview was still available) was released on 2006-05-24. This remained stable until 2009, when Intel gave me a multicore laptop to start doing multicore software.

The new thread-safe thread-based design (code named "Rodent", for Francois' icon theme) required a rewrite of the Xffm code. For this rewrite several goals were set forth:
  * Thread based, thread safe design
  * Cleaner and simpler build process
  * Faster and more powerful
  * Unnerdification (this a bit surreal, coming from a nerd)

As part of the unnerdification, the old treeview is gone. To keep it simple, the graphic part is as simple as the concept developed by the guys at Palo Alto (you know, the guys who first came up with the idea of rodent ---or mouse-- for a computer). Nothing more. Simple uncluttered graphics. Along side this graphic part is the keyboard. A place to issue commands. Graphic, but not for dummies.

The first release of Rodent Alpha, (aka xffm-4.6.0) was in November 2010. And was presented at a conference at the University of Sonora. The second release was much more stable. This was Rodent Beta (aka xffm-4.6.2) in April 2011. The third release, code name Rodent Beta 2 (aka xffm-4.6.4) will be in a few days from today.

Beta 2 is much faster, much more stable and will have over 95% translation for the main non-English speaking Rodent user base (Germany, Spain, France, Ukraine and Russia), along with many other languages. This will be available very soon at the sourceforge download site.

cheers!

More information about Rodent can be found at http://rodent.xffm.org/

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cheers!