2.4 meeting summary (2004-03-01)

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

This is a summary of an IRC meeting that was held this afternoon with 
GTK+ team members (Mark McLoughlin, Luis Villa present as a 
representatives of the GNOME release team)

A complete log of the IRC conversation can be found at:

 http://www.gtk.org/plan/meetings/20040301.txt

 
FileChooser
===========
The conversion to the new user-interface design is pretty much complete
now; the last major piece going in for GTK+-2.3.5 is the save location
Combo for save mode. The current inability to put separators in
GtkComboBox turns out to be a bit of a problem for this and possible
technical solutions were discussed, but likely the separator will
just be omitted for 2.4.0.

There are still lots of little bits and bugs to fix before 2.4.0. 
Jonathan and Federico will go through there mental lists and the UI spec 
and file remaining issues in bugzila.

GtkComboBox + GtkEntryCompletion
================================
The big remaining issue here is scrolling for GtkComboBox in list mode,
which isn't currently implemented. Plan of attack is to use a fixed size 
dropdown and pop up above the widget to deal with locations near
the bottom of the screen. Matthias will work on that.

Kris pointed out that list mode isn't going to work that well until
we have a drag-select mode for GtkTreeView, but that isn't going to
happen for 2.4.0.

Another issue that is still open is accessibility support for GtkCombo;
what the GTK+ team wants to do for that is to punt the issue until
after 2.4.0, then put the accessibility implementation for this widget
*inside* GTK+ in a 2.4.x release. The API needed for accessibility for
GtkComboBox and GtkCellView seems insufficiently known at this point
to go into 2.4.0; putting the accessibility implementation internal
should avoid the need to add API in a 2.4.x point release.

2.3.5 / 2.4.0 release
=====================
The 2.3.5 was being worked on at the time of the meeting and expected
to be out by the end of the data.

Conversation turned to how well tested / quality of a release 2.4.0
will be. There was some general feeling that it wasn't getting a
a lot of banging on yet, though most of the new API is being used in
GNOME-2.5 in one way or the other.

The expectation is that we'll need to do a few point releases after
2.4.0 to catch whatever bugs that creap in. 

Win32
=====
The status of the Win32 port was discussed; Tor hasn't had much time
to work on it recently and hasn't run it for a while, but it appears
that Hans Breuer and J. Ali Harlow are doing a quite a bit of work to
keep the 2.4 branch working. There was some inconclusive discussion
about what could be done to coordinate Win32 development better
with the main releases and about possible 2.6 features (integration
of gtk-wimp and the recently announced IME input method module
being high on the list.)

Other notes
===========
* Happy birthday Matthias