Please note that garcon is not a core component (only an essential dependency) but it is especially relevant for the Xfce 4.8 development cycle for two reasons:

1. It's (going to be) used everywhere (xfce4-panel, xfdesktop, xfce4-appfinder, …)
2. It's not finished (main thing missing is monitoring)

libxfce4menu 4.6 used a dead simple approach for menu and menu item monitoring: destroy existing menus upon changes and require applications to rebuild their menu from the bottom up. This is very inefficient. Now with garcon we have a proper, very detailed representation of the menu tree and its elements in memory. We can use that to handle many of the changes that can be made to the file system. Everything from the destroy-and-recreate approach up to menu tree patching and fine-grained menu monitoring is possible.

This is discussed in more detail on garcon.

Completed: 60-70%
Assignees: Nick, Jannis
Difficulty: Tough

I've presented some of the ideas I have in mind for making it possible to write full-fleshed menu editors on top of garcon on http://gezeiten.org/post/2009/02/Thoughts-on-libxfce4menu-for-Xfce-48. This is optional for this cycle as it is not required by an core components of Xfce.

Completed: 0% (Optional)
Assignee: Jannis
Difficulty: Tough