Re: [Evolution-hackers] Reconsidering our release cycle

[Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com>]

On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 07:21 -0400, Paul Smith wrote:
> Not being familiar with Evo development I'm not sure how feasible it is,
> but ideally part of the change in release cycle would mean divorce from
> the Gnome version lockstep, and Evo being able to build against multiple
> versions of Gnome.  If Evo were changed to be more of a stand-alone
> utility (at least optionally), rather than being bundled with Gnome,
> that would be (IMO) a good thing for users.

I've already come to regard Evolution as a GTK+ application rather than
a GNOME application.  While we do have some (optional) desktop-specific
integration for GNOME and Unity, I for one do most of my development on
XFCE nowadays.

Evolution has also been buildable on multiple GNOME releases for awhile
now.  For the past several years I've tried to ensure the development
branch of Evolution and co. remains buildable on the latest *stable*
GNOME development platform, such that our major releases are actually
developed for the previous GNOME release.  Evolution 3.8, for example,
builds on both GNOME 3.8 and GNOME 3.6.

I think targeting the latest stable development platform strikes a good
balance between utilizing new advancements in the platform and keeping a
safe distance from the chaos at the bleeding edge.  I don't foresee that
policy changing as we transition to a longer release cycle.

Matt