Re: [RFC] Proposal for GtkSourceView 3.24, 3.50 and 3.90

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 12:40:45PM +0200, Paolo Borelli wrote:
>       honestly the plan sounds too complicated to me. It is confusing to
> me, and I am watching the development fairly closely, I suspect that for
> other downstream users of the library it would be too much churn.
>
> I propose to simply:
>
> 1) keep the stable gtk3 release in sync with the gnome versioning (3.22)
> with deprecations etc. The two minor API additions seems very minor
> features and I think they can wait for the next devel cycle, so in a few
> months we will release 3.24 with those additions as we usually do
> 2) Release 3.90 that uses gtk 3.90 and does the namespace change. The
> namespace change is pretty mechanical so it can be easily done at the same
> time of adopting gtk4 and having a stable gtk3 version with just the
> namespace change is overkill and the weird version number will confuse
> people. If needed we can make the first gtk 3.90.0 release just be the
> namespace change without bumping gtk and bump in gtk in 3.90.1 so that
> people doing the porting have a stepping stone. The ABI break between
> 3.90.0 and 3.90.1 would not be a problem since 3.90 series is not abi
> stable anyway.

Some rationales for doing a 3.50 version:

Although the namespace change is mechanical, for some apps it results to
a huge commit. So it is better to be able to compile the code, run the
unit tests, etc. Because the port to GTK+ 4, just to be able to compile
the code again, it can also result to a huge commit (or it's probably
better to create a branch, even if it doesn't compile at each commit).
It is important to be able to compile and test the code as often as
possible, and doing small incremental steps.

Also, for the namespace change, a script will be provided for C code,
but not for other languages. In Python or JS, there is no compilation so
it is even harder to make sure that nothing broke.

Another thing, for developers wanting to write a new app in GTK+ 3
(GTK+ 4 will be stable only in two years or more), it would be better to
directly use the Gsv namespace, it would be stupid to write new code
when GtkSourceView has already changed its namespace on the master
branch. -> And that's a rationale for doing an actual release/tarball of
3.50, not just keeping it in Git.

And anyway, developers can skip the 3.50 version and use directly 3.90,
if they are confident enough. But personally, for the code I
develop/maintain that depends on GtkSourceView (Gtef, LaTeXila and
gCSVedit), I would prefer having the 3.50 intermediary step.

--
Sébastien