This is an old revision of the document!
Xfce Development Information
Introduction
For a more in-depth look into how to contribute to Xfce, as a developer, it is recommended to read The Ultimate Contributor's Guide to Xfce for more information.
- To request a contributor account, please see the docs for more information.
- Before getting involved with development, it may help to check the current roadmap to get an overview of our current progress.
- A guide to using Git with Xfce can be found here.
- For more information on making a release, see Making a Release.
- Xfce API documentation can be found on the Xfce development Wiki.
Communication with the Xfce development team
There are various ways to get in touch with Xfce developers:
- For general questions, Xfce's Forum, the Xfce mailing list, and our IRC channel #xfce on Freenode are the places to go.
- Matrix provides a bridge to the #freenode IRC network. So you as well can connect to our IRC channel with any matrix client and use matrix as bouncer.
- For any translation stuff, join the Xfce-i18n mailing list.
- For anything code related, go to the Xfce-dev mailing list, or our IRC channel #xfce-dev on Freenode.
All Xfce developers have a real life and live across multiple time zones. If you don't get an answer straight away, be patient and stay online!
Developer's Tools
(The following list is extracted from The Ultimate Contributor's Guide to Xfce)
- Use whatever text editor/IDE you are comfortable with.
- The terminal is your friend, get used to it, then you will love it.
- If you want a local Docker-based build environment and build script check out the https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-dev-tools/-/blob/master/helpers/xfce-build and the xfce/xfce-build:latest container.
- Now that almost all components are gtk3-based, GtkInspector is an invaluable tool.
- xfce-test is a Docker container “based on Ubuntu with a build from git sources of all core Xfce components” used for testing and development. See the Xfce-test Quick Start Guide for basic installation instructions.
Debugging
Additional Reading
- See the Xfce/Git page for additional reference material on using Git