Look ahead at GNOME 3.26

[Marc Deslauriers]

Hi,

On 2017-04-24 09:53 PM, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> 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.

Oh! That new plan makes much more sense.

> 
>> 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.

Since they will be bumping the soname, it will be a bit easier to ship both the
pre-release version and eventually the final 4.0 version once it becomes stable.

The packaging may need to reflect that now perhaps by having a distinct name and
not creating a major soname symlink. Not sure what the policy is here...

Or perhaps the best thing to do is not to ship gtk4 apps until it's released.

Marc.