Xfce participation in GSoC 2021

I am a bit late with my blog post .. though I suppose better late than never 😀

This year Xfce applied to the Google Summer of Code program and I am happy to tell you that we accomplished to get 3 slots ! (That’s very good, since new organization usually only receive one or two slots)

There was a lot of interest by students. In total 15 proposals were received for Xfce.
So sadly we had to refuse several nice proposals. However the number of mentors as well was limited, so that this year Xfce anyhow would not be able to mentor more students.

Now there are 3 very motivated GSoC students supporting Xfce. Allow me to introduce:

Yongha Hwang, who applied for various thunar issues, mostly related to file transmission.

Sergios Anestis Kefalidis, who as well works on thunar, targeting a wide range of features.

Vishal Sharma, who is looking into sample/skeleton panel plugins in different GOI supported languages.

Since I maintain thunar, I am the main mentor of Sergios and Yongha.

These two and as well some other thunar focused GSoC applicants kept me very busy by adding many contributions long before the official coding part started 🙂
Already now I think mentoring for GSoC was a good thing to do. The gain by far outweighs the burden. I don’t have much time left to work on issues myself, though the students overcompensate that by magnitudes.

Here a small taste of the recent activity related to GSoC:

• Thunar issues fixed by GSoC students
• Currently 12 open thunar merge requests, 9 opened by GSoC students

… and that is only thunar. There is as well a lot of activity on exo and libxfce4-util !

Many various smaller tweaks already made it into thunar 4.17.2. Some bigger ones, e.g. issues from the project ideas list are currently in work, or even already landed in the current master.

If you want to take a peek on the upcoming changes and new features already now, you can check the students frequent blog posts:

Yongha Hwang:

• GSoC Posting1
• GSoC Posting2
• GSoC Posting3

Sergios Anestis Kefalidis:

• GSoC Posting1
• GSoC Posting2

Vishal Sharma:

• GSoC Posting1
• GSoC Posting2
• GSoC Posting3

Hope you will enjoy the upcoming changes!