Re: [RFC] Proposal for GtkSourceView 3.24, 3.50 and 3.90

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Tue, Nov 01, 2016 at 07:57:47PM -0700, Matthew Brush wrote:
> Do you have any recommendations for applications wanting to support a range
> of GSV versions from before and after the rename?

What GNOME applications do is to follow the GTK+ release schedule (or,
more correctly, GTK+ 3 has followed the GNOME release schedule). With a
new minor release every 6 months. If you want to install a GNOME
application on an old LTS distro, you install the version of the
application corresponding to the GTK+ version shipped by the distro.
Say, gedit 3.14 for GTK+ 3.14.

If you want to write new code in 2016 and still want to run that code on
an LTS distro from 2014, then use only APIs that are available in the
GTK+ and GtkSourceView versions from 2014. GtkSourceView has kept a good
backward-compatibility. GTK+ less so (for the CSS etc). So while it can
make sense to write conditional code depending on the GTK+ version to
make the app work with different versions of GTK+, it doesn't make sense
for GtkSourceView, in my opinion.

Now with the long term stability promise of GTK+, you can just target
GTK+ 3.22. In the future the only GTK+ 3 version available in LTS
distros will be the 3.22. So it'll make things simpler. Ditto when 4.0,
5.0 etc will be released.

Another thing that will make things simpler is container systems like
Flatpak.

> I guess making a header
> with a bunch of #defines mapping to the old names would work, but perhaps
> there's something less tedious I missed, or some compatibility path planned?

A header with a bunch of #defines could be written, if it is really
useful for some applications, why not. But I'm not going to write it :-)
I don't need it, and I don't see why it would be useful. But
contribution welcome.

--
Sébastien