Projects libfm and pcmanfm are now merged!


Today, we decided to move libfm, which aimed to be a core lib for developing file managers, to pcmanfm project. This doesn’t mean that you’ll need pcmanfm to use libfm. They are just hosted in the same project.

Advantage:

  1. Bug tracker and developer membership can be shared. (The most important one) Since it’s difficult for the users to differentiate whether the bug is in libfm or pcmanfm.
  2. Mailing list and other resources can be shared since pcmanfm is the main user of libfm.
  3. PCManFM and libfm won’t be out of sync.

Disadvantage:

  1. The original git repo and project page of libfm will be removed.
  2. Previously checked out git repos won’t work and you cannot use git pull directly to sync with the remote one.

However we consider this an important move to concentrate development resources. Since SourceForge.net now supports creating multiple git repos for a project, there is no need to separate those two anymore. Later the new pcmanfm based on libfm will be put in git repo of pcmanfm project.

Use this command line to grab the latest source code of libfm.
git clone git://pcmanfm.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/pcmanfm/libfm

I believe that the update of the file manager will be the most important milestone for LXDE. Please be patient. Just wait and see what’ll happen in 2010. Maybe it’s too early to expect any eye-refreshing stuff for Lubuntu 9.10 since the major update of LXDE won’t happen in one month. However, we believe that at the time of next Ubuntu LTS release, LXDE will become mature and can be a real industrial desktop solution.

Last but not the least, developers are wanted! Please join the development and get involved if you can.


7 responses to “Projects libfm and pcmanfm are now merged!”

  1. It’s a pity that PCManFM will use libfm based on gvfs. You make the same mistake as Thunar’s developers. Although GVFS has some nice features, it’s too heavy and too slow. When I recently compared Thunar@ThunarVFS and Thunar@GVFS, Thunar@GVFS was twice as slow as Thunar@ThunarVFS when it came to loading /usr/lib directory. I’m expecting the same to happen to pcmanfm. Moreover, GVFS has ugly depencies on most of distributions – e.g. on ArchLinux it is samba, avahi, fuse, bluez, gnome-keyring, libarchive, libcdio, libgphoto, libsoup and those have even more depencies.
    Now when pcmanfm will use GVFS, I end up with bloated system and it is no more choose for me.

  2. I must say I agree with Jaroslav. The dependencies of gvfs are just too much. If gvfs can be trimmed down, then ok, but if all those dependencies are not optional… I’ll stay with the current pre-gvfs version of PCManFM.

  3. hey pcman, lxde’s suse 11.0 repo dead.

    linux-q11d:/home/neo # zypper in -t pattern ‘LXDE Desktop’
    Reading installed packages…

    The following NEW packages are going to be installed:
    menu-cache lxmenu-data lxshortcut lxsession-edit

    The following NEW pattern is going to be installed:
    LXDE Desktop

    Overall download size: 163.0 K. After the operation, additional 484.0 K will be used.
    Continue? [YES/no]: YES
    Downloading package menu-cache-0.2.2-2.1.i586 (1/5), 67.0 K (195.0 K unpacked)
    Downloading: menu-cache-0.2.2-2.1.i586.rpm [error]
    File ‘./i586/menu-cache-0.2.2-2.1.i586.rpm’ not found on medium ‘http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/swyear/openSUSE_11.0/’

    Abort, retry, ignore? [A/r/i]: i
    Downloading package lxmenu-data-0.1-2.1.i586 (2/5), 54.0 K (160.0 K unpacked)
    Downloading: lxmenu-data-0.1-2.1.i586.rpm [error]
    File ‘./i586/lxmenu-data-0.1-2.1.i586.rpm’ not found on medium ‘http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/swyear/openSUSE_11.0/’

    Abort, retry, ignore? [A/r/i]: i
    Downloading package lxshortcut-0.1-3.1.i586 (3/5), 28.0 K (88.0 K unpacked)
    Downloading: lxshortcut-0.1-3.1.i586.rpm [error]
    File ‘./i586/lxshortcut-0.1-3.1.i586.rpm’ not found on medium ‘http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/swyear/openSUSE_11.0/’

    Abort, retry, ignore? [A/r/i]: i
    Downloading package lxsession-edit-0.1-2.1.i586 (4/5), 14.0 K (41.0 K unpacked)
    Downloading: lxsession-edit-0.1-2.1.i586.rpm [error]
    File ‘./i586/lxsession-edit-0.1-2.1.i586.rpm’ not found on medium ‘http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/swyear/openSUSE_11.0/’

    Abort, retry, ignore? [A/r/i]: i
    linux-q11d:/home/neo #

  4. @anonymous: Good. So it indeed can be trimmed down. Arch makes it easy to roll one’s own package, just modify the PKGBUILD and then makepkg. Everything’s ok for me then.

  5. Gvfs have 2 minimal dependencies, the rest is optional, but disabling them will make gvfs pretty much minimal.

    Probably for pcmanFM the only major need that gvfs would provide is file network connectivity (E.g.: Samba, NFS) and non-unicode support (wich is not trivial, but most people in the world (except US citizens) needs and everyone except KDE supports)

    Gvfs is not a bad choice, but probably should be trimmed. but let’s just leave this as the devs criteria.