Re: Ok to release GtkSourceView 3.24 in a few weeks?

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 03:20:08PM -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> On Mon, 2016-10-24 at 22:00 +0200, Sébastien Wilmet wrote:
> > It is primarily new APIs replacing old ones. In one case, the new API
> > is
> > more powerful than the previous one, so it can be seen as a new
> > feature.
> > So if it is released as 3.22.2, it would break: the API freeze, the
> > feature freeze, and the string freeze.
> >
> > The GNOME versioning scheme has clear semantics, which makes life
> > easier
> > for downstreams. By releasing GtkSourceView 3.24, we directly know
> > what
> > it can entail.
>
> So it sounds like it can just wait until March, right? You could do
> GtkSourceView 3.24 and 3.90 at the same time in March?

It is actually more complicated than that. All the information is at:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GtkSourceView/TransitionToGtkSourceView4

We are not yet decided on how to handle the namespace change. It'll be
painful for applications, so the idea is to make it less painful (with
more incremental steps).

I wanted to have 3.24 out of the way, so we can say "it's done" and
continue with the next steps. With 3.24 released early, applications can
already be ported to it (and do a stable release).

As much as I like the 6 months release schedule, I think for a period of
transition like here it is less appropriate. "Release early, release
often", they said. 6 months can be considered too long nowadays. For
example, with Flatpak, Allan proposed a more rapid cadence for
applications, in this blog post:
https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2015/11/12/the-next-big-thing/

So I think the GNOME project will anyway need to deal with modules
wanting to release new minor stable versions more often.

For stable versions of distros (that want only bug fixes and translation
updates for their packages), GtkSourceView 3.24 should be shipped
alongside GNOME 3.24. For rolling release distros, GtkSourceView can be
updated to 3.24 as soon as it is released. The same for GtkSourceView
3.50 if we decide to do such a stable version.

--
Sébastien