Re: GNOME 2.11/2.12 targeting GTK+ 2.8 (ie cairo based)

[Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com>]

On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 14:33 +0200, Frederic Crozat wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I only discovered this morning by looking at James commit for jhbuild
> that GNOME 2.11/2.12 is supposed to ship with GTK+ 2.8 (and therefore
> Cairo) which might not have been obvious for anybody reading
> http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap (since there is only a reference to cairo
> used to replace libgnomecanvas/libart). And I'm not sure all GNOME
> hackers have realized we are supposed to switch to GTK+ 2.8/Cairo.
> 
> Since I'm kind of conservative and pessimist guy (working for a vendor
> and being a release team member probably doesn't help for that :), I'm a
> little worried that we base our next stable of GNOME on a yet to be
> released version of GTK+ which is supposed to change a lot of things
> internally for GTK+, which might also impact GNOME software.
> 
> Could GTK+ hackers give us a status of GTK+ 2.8, compared to their plans
> from  http://gtk.org/plan/2.8/ ?
> 
> Don't get me wrong, I don't want to undermine GTK+ hackers works, but I
> feel we should clarify the situation for everybody best interest.

If you look at www.gtk.org/plan/2.8, you'll see that our schedule calls
for a 2.7.0 release with all major 2.8 features in by June 1, so we are
a bit behind the schedule already. Looking at the features listed on
that page

- Cairo support: is in CVS, and seems to work reasonably well. The main
  question mark here is if we are confident that the Cairo api as of   
  0.5.0 is stable enough for our purposes. Ideally, we'd have an
  officially api-stable Cairo release. I guess Owen can comment on
  this when he is back.

- GObject introspection: The current prototype in the   
  gobject-instrospection module in cvs is not ready for inclusion yet.
  I feel that we would do better to not rush this in 2.8 at this point.
  
- iconview and menu system enhancements: in CVS

- gail integration: not in CVS, there is a patch, but no activity

- libglade integration: not in CVS, there is a patch, but I think
  some details still need discussion/work.


My feeling is that we should probably drop gobject introspection, gail
and libglade integration from the 2.8 feature list at this point, and
aim for a feature-complete 2.7.0 release sometime next week. 

Matthias