The Xfce4-panel Clock's pop-up calendar, Orage, and Orage clock-plugin all use the same code to display a calendar. Xfce4-panel Clock is a great clock plugin with a calendar that does nothing else. The Orage clock-plugin is a less sophisticated clock that will open the Orage calendar, but only when clicked, i.e. not on startup, and thus fails to trigger alarms (bug 10550). Orage is a great calendar that has no clock.

I propose a new plugin that pulls from both projects. The new plugin's front-end would be the Xfce4-panel Clock that, when clicked, would display the Orage calendar with all of its features. The new plugin would start Orage during session login, or at least the bare minimum of Orage needed to trigger its event alarms.

I imagine this to be more of a build option than anything else. In other words, both the Xfce4-panel Clock and Orage would continue to be maintained separately for new features and bugs, and both would act as the upstream projects of this new plugin. Only the Xfce4-panel Clock would need to be minimally modified to include some conditional compilation to include Orage when building the new plugin. This would also allow the Xfce4-panel Clock to continue to be lightweight for users who would not want this feature.