Staying on GTK/GNOME 3.8 next cycle/for the LTS?

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le 02/10/2013 12:31, Tim a écrit :
> I am however concerned how this will all pan out if it does indeed end 
> up being a 2 cycle delay. From which I can see it sliding further 
> downhill as time progresses, until Ubuntu drop the GNOME stack, 
> leaving us with a big mess to clean up and perhaps mission impossible 
> to catch up again.

That's a valid concern, just some notes:

* we don't plan to keep staying 2 cycles behind for ever, going back to 
"stay on the current" stable worked fine and I think we should keep 
doing that.

The main motivation here are:

- trying to avoid the endless discussions about option depreciations (we 
already got some user flack for that g-s-d upload that made some of the 
xsettings not being set anymore), it would be good to have an LTS out 
with users about it, and then have the next LTS cycles to deal with 
controversial changes

- sharing the bug fix work with other distributions. If RedHat uses 
GNOME 3.8 for their coming edition, there is a good chance that this 
version is going to get extra support over the next years, and there is 
a good opportunity to share work/increase quality there

- having some capacity to deal with the bugs and usability issues that 
got added over the previous cycle. We have limited resources (especially 
with the focus on phone) and it would be good to be able to focus those 
on quality for the LTS

* we don't plan to drop GNOME, we are going to keep maintaining glib/gtk 
and some of the GNOME components and apps for a long time. It might be 
that we are going to be less involved in some of the components but it 
shouldn't be an issue for the GNOME remix (if anything, it should make 
your job easier since it means less patches to carry/update)

Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher