Re: gtk 2.8 for gnome 2.12

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

> This was sort of already decided in the thread, but after the release
> team meeting today, we figured it was worth mentioning officially.
> 
> GNOME 2.12 *will* depend on gtk 2.8.

This seems to add significant risk to Gnome 2.12 and I believe its
reckless for Gnome to do such a release in the light of breaking up with
the published plans that we have presented to various consumers of
Gnome. 

There are only a few weeks left until Gnome 2.12 (six weeks) and
introducing a large change like this as late in the process seems like a
bad idea because this adds a significant risk to Gnome:

	* The new Gtk 2.8 API is not mature.

	  By maturity I mean the Brad Cox metric of maturity: have the
	  new API calls been used in at least three diverse applications
	  and the feedback incorporated?

	  Just to get app writers to target 2.8, release their apps and
	  test it sounds like it would take more than six weeks (am
	  assuming there are a number of freezes before this which would
	  make this window smaller).

	* This breaks the published schedule, new features and modules
	  were supposed to be locked-down on July 13th:

		http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning_2fTwoPointEleven

	* The UI freeze for applications is five days from now, it
	  seems reckless to inform developers that:

                "go ahead and use new 2.8 APIs[1]. If you do, though,
                please make the change earlier rather than later, and
                test thoroughly and make sure you obsessively report
                problems to the gtk team, as you would with any new
                library with new API."
                
I would like to propose that adopting Gtk+ 2.8 should happen after each
module has branched for the 2.12 release which means that applications
will get another 4-5 months of testing of Gtk+ and Gtk+ 2.8 will get 4-5
months of testing of APIs that until today have not been adopted by a
single application.

Miguel.