Re: GNOME 2.11/2.12 targeting GTK+ 2.8 (ie cairo based)



Somewhat random set of comments:

- For all the reasons that it makes sense for GNOME to stick to it's
  published schedules, it makes sense for GTK+ to stick to it's
  published schedules. While we haven't always done a great job
  in the past (GTK+-2.2.0 was particularly bad), that doesn't
  mean that we have "license to slip".

  There are certainly people who want to slip the GTK+-2.6 schedule
  so we can get in introspection or libglade integration, but in
  the end, slipping a few weeks or a month isn't going allow us to
  do a really good job on those. 

  So, regardless of what the GNOME release team decides, I think
  we should stick to the schedule we published.

- To be realistic, if GNOME-2.12 is released after GTK+-2.8, 
  most distributors are going to ship using them together.

  So, the release team could decide to go with 2.6 even with 
  the current GTK+ schedule, but the result then would be less
  testing of what people actually ship.

- For new APIs to be done well, we need language binding 
  author attention. If we decided to slip out the GTK+ schedule
  a month or two and add more features, I'm not sure that those
  features would get sufficient language binding author attention.

- While GNOME isn't going to be using many Cairo features for 2.12,
  getting Cairo-1.0 and GTK+-2.8 out there early is important to
  getting apps out using GTK+ and Cairo together for 2.14.

I think that a GTK+ with Cairo and small features is very realistic
on the schedule on gtk.org/plan/2.8.

One inherent difficulty with the way that GNOME is working these
days is with a new feature-release every 6 months, we don't really
give ourselves any time for .0 shakeout.  A major code change
can easily take 6 months - after release - to shake out. By that
time, with our scheduling, we've released more major code changes.

Honestly, I expect some portability issues with Cairo after
1.0 is released. It's not going to work well on some set of older
X servers, and we'll have to work around those issues. But 
people aren't going to find those issues until GNOME or a major
app is depending on Cairo. 

Regards,
					Owen

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part



[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]