Re: Guidelines for stable branch changes in GLib/Gtk

[Matthew Brush <mbrush codebrainz ca>]

On 12-11-11 12:24 PM, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> 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...

I know it's somewhat off-topic from the thread, but since you mentioned 
it...

I also think that #3 is a huge problem. It broke so many apps that were 
doing "the right thing" by not setting a default/current folder, there's 
a large bug ticket (multiple ones actually) with lots of unhappy users 
and GTK+ application developers offering some reasonable solutions, it 
was not (that I can tell) ever discussed anywhere except on a GNOME 
guy's personal blog, it never got documented anywhere in the 2.x 
GtkFileChooser docs, and selfishly, it's a huge pain in the butt for me 
many times every day :)

Any chance of reverting/fixing those changes?

Here's some related bug reports I could find:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=658280
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=667252
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=687247
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676636
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=675792
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682931
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=675961
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665919
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665297
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674600
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680248
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=684964

Note: there's a bunch of dupes in the list because it shows the extent 
to which this also disrupted applications (which the bugs then (rightly) 
got re-assigned/marked as duplicates).

Cheers,
Matthew Brush