Re: Issuing a press release about GNOME 3

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 08:15 -0700, Luis Villa wrote:
[snip]
> The fact that the very first
> sentence of http://live.gnome.org/GNOME3 is wrong: "GNOME 3 is needed
> as GTK+ 3 will happen." is just not a good sign. (There are ways to
> educate developers about API/ABI change besides major version numbers
> of the desktop, so GTK3 need not force GNOME3.)
[snip]

I discussed this with Luis in person, without us agreeing, so I don't
expect to persuade him here, but:

It looks like GTK+ 3.0 really is going to happen. I haven't seen enough
justification for it yet, but that's a separate issue. So that creates
an opportunity for some social engineering because it's a symbolic
detail that developers care about. The release-team wants to use the
opportunity to build a plan for a GNOME 3.0. I think it's foolish to say
that there will be a GNOME 3.0 until the release team have got that
feedback and made a plan. We can only announce that we are thinking
about it.

Plan B:
- If that experiment in social engineering doesn't work out, maybe GNOME
3.0 just won't happen, and that should be OK. Let's not create a hole
that we need to fill with crap.
- However, even there are no big-enough features to justify a GNOME 3.0
for users, it will be hard not to call our develpoper libraries 3.0
because GTK+ 3.0 will force us to ABI break and parallel install.
- A GNOME 2.3* built on libgnome*-3.0 would be a bit strange, though
maybe not the end of the world.

-- 
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com