Since the last post, few things did happen. Basically, it's still not the right time for Debian users to upgrade to Xfce 4.8. We eventually managed to upload the whole desktop part (except the xfce metapackage) to experimental and we did upload some of the goodies too. Licensing issues have been solved so the concerned packages have been uploaded, and we're right now waiting on the three packages sitting in NEW.

• garcon is really mandatory for Xfce 4.8 since it implements the menu library, used by xfce4-panel, xfdesktop and xfce4-appfinder;
• thunar-vfs is needed if you want to keep the goodies not yet ported to the new thunar gio-based API (right now that means squeeze, the archiver, not the distribution);
• tumbler is a replacement for thunar-thumbnailers, implementing a standard thumbnailing interface, so it's possible to skip it for now.

So you'll need to be a little more patient and kindly wait for our ftp-masters to process the (quite huge) NEW backlog. After that we'll need a bit more time in experimental to test upgrade cases, then we'll do an upload to unstable of the whole desktop part and the whole goodies.

Upgrading to xfce4-panel 4.8 means *all* plugins need to be rebuilt too, so that means a huge upgrade and a quite large transition to handle for the release team, so we'll have to schedule the unstable upload with them in order not to break all their plans (yes, we try to be good Debian citizens)

So please be patient, but you'll see Xfce 4.8 in unstable in a not too distant future. I'll put an update here when we'll need brave volunteers willing to break their systems by doing upgrade tests.

[UPDATE]: garcon, thunar-vfs and tumbler were just accepted into experimental, thanks to our ftp-masters. Now we'll synchronize with release team and upload to unstable when possible.