Re: Gtk+4.0

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <pochu27 gmail com>]

Hi,

On 21/06/16 16:26, Peter Weber wrote:
> I don't see here an active discussion about Gtk+4.0[1]? So I'm trying to
> write about my thoughts, in a careful way. In the first moment, I thought
> this is a good idea and just the numbering is misleading. Stability is what
> developers want, we need it, we love it. With a few days distance,
> numbering is just a small issue, I see this now entirely different and
> three major issues:

Here are some thoughts I have about all this, from a downstream maintainer POV.

My concern with this new scheme is that GTK+ libraries will have to bump the
soname every 6 months (if they want to support the latest GTK+). That can be
manageable for say vte or gnome-desktop, although it may be bad if some third
party apps pick a dependency on the vte for GTK+ 4.2 but don't update it for
GTK+ 4.4, as then distros would need to ship an increasing number of versions
that are unlikely to get any support upstream.

But do you expect WebKitGTK+ to bump the ABI every 6 months?

I feel like the X.[024] releases are just snapshots of a development branch,
with X.6 being the stable release, and I wonder if X.[024] shouldn't clearly be
labelled as that, regardless of what version number is chosen (be it 4.0,
3.99.0, 4.0beta1 or whatever).

Cheers,
Emilio