Re: gtk3 planning

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 11:28 AM, Colin Walters <walters verbum org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> So I'm really concerned about what I see as the current GTK+ 3.0 plan,
> which is to release a frozen 3.0 in August.  At that point, we'll have
> *two* ABI frozen libraries that are 92.3% the same.  That's a really
> unfortunate situation, especially since a good chunk of the features
> that are currently in 3 could just as well (with some extra elbow
> grease perhaps) have landed in 2.

Sure, we could continue to shoehorn features in to 2.x and it will
increasingly get harder, and the bugs will increasingly get harder to
fix. That's where the whole GTK3 discussion started, if you remember.

> There are also some things (like the theming changes) that appear at
> high risk of not landing in 3.  As far as I understand it, someone did
> some benchmarks hacking out the native theming stuff from Firefox, and
> got dramatic speedups.  If this doesn't land in GTK3, we're losing a
> lot of the potential value we got from the ABI break.
>
> Let me make a concrete proposal, which is basically:
>
> * GTK3 as fast-moving, 1-1.5 year cycle series of libraries, GTK2
> continues to be maintained and gain features

As long as I maintain the 2.x branch, it will be in maintenance mode
and closed to features. I will gladly give up maintainership of the
2.x branch to you if you promise to port all the features that land
there to 3.x as well.

[...]

> The lifecycle here is flexible - we could say 1 year, 2 years, 6
> months, or it could vary.  The point ultimately is again that having a
> permanently frozen GTK 3 with no possibility to do further changes is
> the worst of both worlds, since now we have two 92.3% similar
> straightjackets.
>
> Thoughts ?

There's quite a bit of misrepresentation in here ('frozen',
'straightjacket', ...).

Fwiw, a big motivation for all the sealing business was to make it
possible that GTK3 _can_ move faster and incorporate more new stuff
without the need for disruptive ABI breaks. And the GTK3 plans always
included the idea to do more regular ABI breaks, say every 2-3 years
as well.

And yes, I do agree that it is unfortunate that we can't get
everything we wanted into 3.0, but such is life. People have other
priorities, and days only have 24 hours...