Look ahead at GNOME 3.26

[Jeremy Bicha]

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 7:24 PM, Marc Deslauriers
<marc.deslauriers at canonical.com> wrote:
> 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.

That is an obsolete proposal. The plan now [1] is for the stable
version to start at 4.0. That stable version is supposed to be more
like GTK+ 2.24 or 3.22.

> 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?

GNOME Developers have said that is their intent. [2]

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

Developers outside of GNOME should continue to target GTK+ 3.22 until
GTK+ 4.0 is released.

If this is a problem for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, now is a great time to
bring it up to GNOME since GNOME just released 3.25.1 and nothing has
switched yet.

[1] https://blog.gtk.org/2016/09/01/versioning-and-long-term-stability-promise-in-gtk/
[2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2016-October/msg00033.html

Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha