Re: Guidelines for stable branch changes in GLib/Gtk

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

hi,

On 12-11-11 03:03 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> Hard to disagree in the abstract. But also not much of a discussion unless
> you cite the specific examples that made you write this mail.
> Which changes were problematic ?

There are three specific cases that come to mind:

1) Recently Martin asked me for permission to backport his boxing of 
GPollFD to the stable branch of GLib and I said "no new API on stable 
branches".  I mention this only because of how small of a change it 
would have been compared to the following two:

2) The icon view changes that landed in the 3.4 cycle.

3) The file chooser "recent folder" changes that landed in 3.0 and also 
on 2.x.

I consider the last case to be particularly egregious because nothing 
was broken to start with and the changes were highly visible from a UI 
standpoint.  As I understand it, GNOME enters UI freeze at a particular 
point in time and never leaves it (on a given stable release).  We can 
argue that Gtk is not GNOME, of course...

My main reason for raising these concerns is that I want to see GLib and 
Gtk stable releases picked up by the distributions for the valuable 
bugfixes that they contain but distributions (Ubuntu, specifically) are 
getting annoyed with the non-bugfix changes that are often appearing in 
our stable series...

Cheers