Advice for Nautilus to gtk4

[Carlos Soriano <csoriano gnome org>]

Hello all,

As part of the big work of moving Nautilus to gtk4 I wonder what's the best approach for distributors:

- Merge gtk4 branch now, and the contingency plan is to warn here and recommend to not ship Nautilus 3.32 closer to release in very stable distributions in case things cannot be worked out. Fedora Rawhide, Arch, Tumbleweed, etc. can still benefit us from testing.

- Branch 3.32 already, merge gtk4 branch in master and have 1'5 releases of time to work things out.

The disadvantage of option 1 is that it could be confusing for distributors and could give a bad image for GNOME/Nautilus if not followed.

The disadvantage of option 2 is that 3.32 won't see much attention and therefore progress (even bug fixes) since the code base will change considerably and the rest of contributors will most likely work on the master branch. Also, we would most probably miss on testing from unstable distributions.

Of course, the third option is to "wait and see", but considering the amount of effort we have put into the port and the pace we develop in master, soon will have enough conflicts that the branch will be unusable. So it's not really a good option.

Any advice?

Thanks