The clock face would look better if rendered either larger (then shrunk for display) or rendered using anti-aliasing. Fortunately, Cairo is likely to be available and will do the latter...
Created attachment 644 Render the clock face using Cairo The rendering method is selected at build time; default is --enable-cairo.
Created attachment 645 Render the clock face using Cairo Revised version - requires GTK+2.8 without --disable-cairo.
Thanks for doing this! As far as I know we still only require gtk 2.6, so we can't depend on cairo at the moment. Maybe we could use #ifdef's (ugly!) or otherwise we'd have to wait until Xfce 4.6 (probably a long time) :( Unfortunately I don't have much time to review the patch, but I'll try to have a look at it soon.
Not a problem: #ifdefs etc. are in the patch. "requires GTK+2.8 without --disable-cairo" is misleading. If libcairo is missing then the existing requirement of GTK+2.6 remains sufficient.
Created attachment 675 Render the clock face using Cairo Minor fix: use cairo_fill rather than cairo_stroke to render the ticks (when using rectangles).
The clock in trunk uses cairo rendering. If you think you can improve it, feel free to send a patch, but this one can be closed. (clock code is now inside the clock plugin in xfce4-panel)