Dia's immediate future development

[Cyrille Chepelov <cyrille chepelov org>]

OK folks,

 I couldn't resist further. As I posted this morning, all the prerequisites
necessary for porting dia over to gtk2.0/Pango are well distributed now, at
least in the major "unstable" distributions.

 I would have preferred to take this decision in sync with Lars, but he's
not available for the moment, and we're just having too divergent code bases
based on too complicated #define stuff. Lars, I hope you'll forgive me for
that..

 I can't brake Hans any further, he's got working gtk2.0 code which is
beginning to either suffer bit rot or cause major resync headaches with the
current 0.90 code base. And frankly, I'm as sick of #hell as everybody out
there.

 So, the hot news are:
        * there is no freeze in CVS HEAD.
        * as previously announced ("we won't go to gtk2 until we can and
major distributions carry it"), we can now. So we will. Now.
        * unlike previously announced, there won't be any one-week "brown
bag" quiet time.
        * if we have to do a brown-bag release, I'll RTF cvs M and do it out
of the 0.90 branch.
        * the CVS snapshots are expected to break in the next days, especially 
in the configure.in departement.
        * the two plug-ins floating out there should be reviewed for gtk2.0
compatiblity (they are normally already UTF-8 clean), and merged if they
don't show redhibitous(sp?) misfeatures.
        * we officially abandon support for libxml1, effective the day we
are a gtk2.0 app.
        * there are a couple of patches which should be included ASAP. A
non-inclusive list is #83496 and #83659 (they seem to be orthogonal to the gtk2
effort and will improve things for everyone).
        
        * We will tentatively make a 0.91 = first gtk2.0/Pango release,
ideally sometime late in June. If there is a need to fix the 0.90 series,
there would be 0.90.1 and so on (but I will drag my feet on them. Stuff like
"SuSE configures X11 in a way that the 'fixed' font is unavailable" doesn't
seem critical enough for me).

Have fun.

        -- Cyrille      

-- 
Grumpf.