Re: Gtk+4.0

[Simon McVittie <simon mcvittie collabora co uk>]

On 09/07/16 20:42, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
> In fact, this could be a new plan. If we double down on Flatpak, then we
> could simply not bump soname / major version, leave it at 4, break ABI
> every point release, and have the ".6-multiple" releases be LTS releases
> which are "maintained more than most".

Speaking as a distribution (Debian) developer: breaking the ABI without
bumping the SONAME is really frustrating to deal with in distributions;
so if there will be anything that uses Gtk and is ever distributed in
ways other than Flatpak and similar things, please manage the Gtk SONAME
correctly.

gnome-shell, gnome-control-center and gnome-settings-daemon, together
with their forks in GNOME derivatives like Cinnamon, are among prominent
packages that depend on Gtk but should be part of the distribution's
release process, even in a possible future where ordinary apps are
exclusively distributed via Flatpak. (I don't think that future has
arrived yet, in any case.)

In many cases Debian patches libraries that don't have a SONAME upstream
to introduce its own, with an appended "d" to indicate they are
Debian-specific, like the libstemmer.so.0d used by our current version
of Tracker. The Autotools make this more difficult than it ought to be,
but it's often still less disruptive than not being able to
parallel-install.

-- 
Simon McVittie
Collabora Ltd. <http://www.collabora.com/>