Re: First deprecate APIs and then remove them in the next major version

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Fri, Dec 15, 2017 at 11:10:46AM -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> I know this may sound harsh, but: If you want things to work differently,
> send patches.
> Patches to the migration guide are welcome too.
>
> The bulk of the work done on GTK4 so far has been done by 3 or 4 people,
> only one of
> which gets payed to work fulltime on GTK+.
>
> Maintaining compatibility layers costs and constantly gets in the way of
> large-scale
> refactorings like the ones that are happening in gtk 3.9x now.
>
> Note that we haven't really asked application developers to port to the
> current 3.9x releases
> yet, because they are still in flux.

About the cost of compatibility layers, it reminds me an economics
principle with game theory and cooperation, for example with the
prisoner's dilemma:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#Strategy_for_the_prisoner's_dilemma

With cooperation and compatibility layers in GTK, GTK would move forward
less quickly, but it would maybe yield a better outcome globally when
taking into account higher-level libraries and applications.

--
Sébastien