Re: gtk 2.8 for gnome 2.12

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

> > This seems to add significant risk to Gnome 2.12 and I believe its
> > reckless for Gnome to do such a release in the light of breaking up with
> > the published plans that we have presented to various consumers of
> > Gnome. 
> 
> Having GTK+ 2.8 along with GNOME 2.12 was *always* the plan. Just that
> some people seemed to have cold feet.

Well, Gtk+ 2.7.0 came out on June 20th, so that is a month ago.  If
someone was making plans to have GNOME 2.12 ship with Gtk 2.8 they were
taking some very risky decisions.

On that release it is recommended that people use Cairo from CVS as
well:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2005-June/msg00029.html

I can understand people having cold feed 5 months ago when there was not
even a Gtk 2.7 to test with (and one would materialize only 4 months
later).

> Again, read the API changes, you'll probably change your mind. The

The API changes are incomplete, for instance, its missing the list that
exposes Cairo.  Which brings us to:

> biggest difference between 2.6 and 2.8 is the adoption of Cairo, and
> that seems to have gotten quite a bit of testing, and a lot of bugs
> crushed as a result.

What is being suggested is that we should make Gnome 2.12 on Gtk 2.8
which in turn depends on Cairo 0.5-1 (as of today).

Cairo is:

	* Not API frozen.

	* We do not have a schedule for Cairo being API frozen,
	  which incidentally breaks the API rules:

		http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/api_rules.html

	* Cairo itself has a list of requirements for 1.0 in 
	  cairo/ROADMAP and it looks far from finished.  

	  Section "A9" will break the API, work remains on "A10", "A12"
	  and possibly "A13".  This is in addition to various other
	  items still on the queue before they release 1.0.

	* We do not have a commitment not to break the API after the
	  GNOME 2.12 release in six weeks.

I want a Cairo-based Gnome as much as everyone else, but this is not a
sound decision.  

Breaking promises and changing schedules to get this feature is not
right.

Miguel.