Plans for 1.3/1.4

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Hi,

I wanted to get things rolling with planning for the
1.3 development series of GTK+ and 1.4.

The timescale that the core developers have been discussing
for this release is quite short - we'd like to have
1.4 out by the end of July - 5 months after the release
of 1.2. The freeze date would then be approximately
June 1.

Because of the short time scale, the development needs
to be quite limited in scope. The major changes
currently under discussion are:

 1) Unicode support. This would involve moving all interfaces
    to Unicode, with support for western language, the
    CJK Asian languages, Hebrew, and possibly Arabic.
    The complex text scripts (in particular, those of
    South Asia) would not be included in this release.

 2) A completely rewritten text widget (this is closely 
    tied to 1)

 3) Support for Java-style multiple interfaces in the
    type system. (This will probably be based on
    the system that Tim Janik has implemented for BSE)

 4) Integration of Tor Lillqvist's Win32 port.

The hope is that the only source-incompatible
changes that get made at all for 1.4 would be related to
1) and 2). In general we want to strive for a high
degree of backwards compatibility in 1.4.

It would be nice to have detailed written propsals for
the planned changes written up in the next couple
of weeks. I'm going to try to do this for 1) and 2)
over the next week while I'm at LinuxWorld. (I expect
to have the opportunity to discuss things with the
some of the other developers at that conference).

If you have other plans for significant or even
non-significant changes you want to make for
GTK+-1.4, this would be a very good time to speak
up. (Wishlists from people who don't intend to write
code will mostly, though not completely, ignored)

Regards,
                                        Owen