Stable, long term support releases for gtk+

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi all;

gtk has a policy of only releasing from current-stable and master;
lack of resources, uncertainty on the actual usage, and
unpredictability of some release policies have mostly prevented the
creation of "long term support" branches.

distributors have historically been in charge of taking existing
releases and adding patches to backport fixes from the current-stable
branch (or even from master); the distributor-list mailing list has
been created to allow some sort of awareness for patches, to avoid
per-distribution silos.

this has been raised a bunch of times on IRC and mailing lists, and
the end result of the discussions has always been: "somebody should
show up and do the work".

recently, I wrote a strawman[0] for Clutter 2.0 to detail a possible
policy for LTS releases from the get go, instead of ex post facto.

I think it would be good to have the same policy for GTK+ and maybe
GLib. this means:

  • identifying the current branch of GTK+ 3.x being used by "stable"
distributions (Ubuntu LTS, OpenSuse, RHEL, Debian stable);
  • finding a maintainer in charge of getting the patches from
distributors and maintainers, integrating them, and spinning releases.

the commonly used release of GTK+ 3.x seems to be 3.4, at least for
Debian and Ubuntu.

as for a volunteer for the latter point, I nominate myself - I've been
releasing Clutter for the past 6 years, and given the patches flow, I
can devote a reasonable slice of time to do this at least until the
next LTS cycle.

thoughts?

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

[0] https://live.gnome.org/Clutter/Strawman/LongTermSupport

--
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/