Re: Release dates

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com> writes:

> On Wed, 2002-04-24 at 19:04, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 1. Perhaps we've been bad about regular releases because we always
> >    creep instead of punting things. We need to learn to punt.  GTK 2
> >    only came out when we finally said "god dammit, we are just going
> >    to punt a whole lot of stuff." And it wsan't the end of the world.
> >    GTK 2 does its job and works pretty well.
> 
> IMHO GTK suffered from more than feature creep.  The developers just
> stopped caring about 1.2 and went on rewriting everything...  So of
> course it took forever, it didn't get tested by the GNOME community, and
> went out late.
> 
> What we need is more synergy between GTK and GNOME.  GNOME horribly
> suffered from the fact that, for a long time, GTK 1.2 was completely
> unmaintained, and GTK 2.0 was completely unusable and required a huge
> amount of work to port things to. 

Next, time I really need to try *not* spending ~30% of my time
maintaining the stable branch while working on the development
branch. And see how people like that.

Yes, I don't have time or plans for a 1.2.11 now, but retractively
saying that GTK+-1.2.x was unmaintained while we worked on GTK+-2.0 is
inaccurate and unfair.

Would it be nice if someone else had been around to work on GTK+-1.2.x
while I was doing GTK+-2.0 work? Of course. I'm sure if someone
without the necessary skills and experience was willing to take on the
job, we'd have had more maintenance on the 1.2.x branch and a faster
2.0.0 release. Nobody was.

> For a long time, we just waited for GTK to be "done".  So I think it's
> kind of funny that, after spending all this time to let the GTK
> maintainers make GTK "Perfect", we are now arguing that the desktop can
> go out unpolished and incomplete.
> 
> Although, I am not completely disagreeing with you on the fact that we
> should just be releasing the damn thing.  ;-)  I am just pointing this
> out in the hope that we won't be making the same mistake again.

I hope that mistake you are referring to is not that we spent a lot of
time making sure that the new GTK+ API's actually worked well and will
work well going forward.

Maybe you are saying that the mistake was letting the desktop *become*
unpolished and incomplete just because GTK+ was undergoing major
work. I'd agree with that.

Feature addition to GTK+ was mostly done almost 18 months ago. By cutting
work before that point, we could have sped GTK+-2.0 up, and before
that point, it wouldn't have been reasonable to work on porting the
desktop to GTK+.

But getting GTK+-1.2 to compile against GTK+-2.0 has never been hard,
and even before we stopped adding features, it continually compiled
and worked in CVS. So there is no reason that people couldn't have
ported the GNOME-1.4 desktop as is to GTK+ quite ago, and worked from
there, without ever having had the intermediate "can't compile, can't
run" stage that we were in for quite a while. (But are well away
from now!)

Anyways, I don't want to start pointing fingers. And keep the turn-around
times short is an important goal for 2.x releases of GTK+. 

I'm just all-in-all quite happy with how the GTK+-2.0 release cycle
went and the end product, and am a little upset at the implication
of irresponsibility in your mail.

Regards,
                                        Owen

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