Look ahead at GNOME 3.26

[Jeremy Bicha]

As discussed at last week's meeting, the Ubuntu Desktop team will not
be making a decision about which GNOME version we will target for
Ubuntu 17.10 yet. This is because GNOME developers sometimes make big
changes that require more integration work that is difficult to
complete in the short Ubuntu release cycle.

In the last 2 Ubuntu releases, we made this decision between GNOME
Freeze and Ubuntu's Feature Freeze. This cycle, both the GNOME and
Ubuntu release schedules were modified slightly to give us about 2
weeks there. [1] [2]

I encourage you to visit [3] to get an idea of the goals some GNOME
developers would like to achieve this cycle. Not all goals are
mentioned there and not all goals will necessarily be completed this
cycle. Here's a few more things that may affect us.

GNOME might support non-integer scaling (for Hi-DPI displays).

gjs will probably be ported from mozjs38 to mozjs52 (the current,
supported version of Firefox ESR's JavaScript engine).

The Nautilus developer suggested that Nautilus 3.26 might use gtk4.
Nautilus is fairly standalone and doesn't need to be updated at the
same time as the rest of GNOME. The GTK+ developers were hoping that
part of GNOME would have been using gtk4 for 3.24 which did not
happen, so we'll see what happens here. I have uploaded an initial
gtk4 package to the Artful new queue and the GNOME3 Staging PPA.

By the way, see https://pad.lv/1585903 for ideas on how to reduce our
remaining gtk2 dependencies.

I expect several GNOME components to switch from autotools to meson this cycle.

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointTwentyfive
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseSchedule
[3] https://wiki.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/FeaturePlans

Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha