I tried just to read and not ask anything but no amount of reading has resulted in any enlightenment, so:
Why not do what almost everyone does and have 4.X mean “stable” while anything with alpha/beta/pre/rc means unstable?
KDE made the same mistake with the exact same version number, i.e having the number look stable to everyone while the software was (as they clearly said everywhere!) a pre-release. People used it, distros shipped it, it was buggy and incomplete and everybody was confused and angry as a consequence. Was it simply lack of historic knowledge that led to the GTK-4.0 decision?
Besides, there's no gain in specifying some arbitrary minor version to be suddenly stable (as it was said GTK 4, “somewhere around 4.6” would become). There's exclusively a disadvantage, i.e. that you can't rely on common sense, convention, or any other kind of rule to know if that's a stable version. You have to know our look it up.
Just use http://semver.org and you have something that follows the principle of least surprise.
On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 04:19:30AM +0000, philip chimento gmail com wrote:
> 4. Maintainers of libraries that depend on GTK (such as GtkSourceView, VTE,
> WebKitGTK) are concerned about having to maintain essentially a separate
> library for each unstable release.
When GTK+ breaks the API, it doesn't mean that a higher-level library
needs to break API too. For example, GtkTextView has a quite stable API,
so I think GtkSourceView will still have a stable API too, to keep
backward compatibility during GtkSourceView 4.
> Did I forget anything?
It is expected that GNOME apps will follow the unstable GTK+ versions.
But some GNOME apps (or other libraries, for that matter) are developed
almost entirely by people contributing during their spare time. And the
amount of spare time/energy/willingness to maintain code can vary widely
between development cycles. This includes gedit. I'm not sure it is a
good idea for gedit to follow the unstable versions of GTK+.
--
Sébastien
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