Look ahead at GNOME 3.26

[Marc Deslauriers]

Hi,

On 2017-04-24 07:00 PM, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
<snip>
> 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.
<snip>

I don't quite understand this.

gtk4 is currently at version 3.90. If I understand the new upstream versioning
scheme correctly[1], gtk4 won't have a stable API/ABI until around 4.6.

Does this mean we'll be shipping an LTS release for 18.04 that contains desktop
applications built with a version of gtk4 that is considered by upstream to be a
pre-release version that we'll then need to support for 5 years?

How are we going to handle upgrading to the final API/ABI stable version that
developers are going to target with their applications?

Marc.


[1] - https://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2016/06/13/gtk-4-0-is-not-gtk-4/