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

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 12:29 +0100, Andrew Sobala wrote:

> Hey hey hey, let's stay calm here. GNOME necessarily works on a
> short-term-benefit model; the question we need to ask is "Is going to
> GTK+ 2.8 in less than 6 months *definitely* not going to have any
> negative implications on that version of GNOME?" And it's a fair
> question to ask, because last time we did this the answer was "Yes, it
> did."

	That particular negative impact on GNOME you're referring to is that it
delayed the GNOME release.

	Matthias's mail basically says that that isn't going to be an issue
this time and details what the GTK+ guys are doing to make sure of that.

	So, lets not get things mixed up here. Performance worries are very
different from meeting-the-schedule worries.

> We're blatantly going to use GTK+ 2.8 by 2.14 at the latest, but GTK+
> does work on a cycle with a longer feature-implementing stage, and so
> necessarily a longer improvements-and-bug-fixing stage. Which is fine.
> But we need to be careful about it.
> 
> No-one was implying that Cairo was a Bad Idea (tm), only whether we
> could be >99% sure of it being as stable as and as fast as the current
> stable GTK+ in a relatively short timescale.

	I think these kind of questions are only relevant in the context of
deciding on the *gtk* schedule. I don't think they're very relevant in
the context of deciding whether GNOME 2.12 should use GTK+ 2.8. If we're
all confident the schedules line up, then I don't think there's really
any more discussion to be had.

	If we're talking about performance/stability in the context of whether
GNOME 2.12 should use GTK+ 2.8, we're effectively saying "I think the
GTK+ team might ship a unstable or unacceptably slow 2.8.0 release;
GNOME shouldn't commit to using GTK+ 2.8 yet". I would hope that we
would have more confidence in the judgement of the GTK+ team than that.

Cheers,
Mark.