[Shotwell] Warning: Compiling Shotwell 0.11.2 with Vala 0.13 or Later

[Lucas Beeler]

Hi Shotwell Fans,

As most of you know, the most recently released stable version of
Shotwell is 0.11.2. Since the release of Shotwell 0.11.2, Shotwell's
trunk has continued to evolve. For example, Shotwell trunk has been
ported to GTK+ 3. Another change we've made in trunk since the last
release has been tweaking the Shotwell code base to compile with Vala
0.14. Since there might be some confusion about which version of Vala
to use to compile the various flavors of Shotwell, I'm writing this
message.

If you're building the latest stable release of Shotwell, 0.11.2, you
must build it with Vala 0.12. In fact, Shotwell 0.11.2's Makefile
won't let you compile with any version of Vala newer than Vala 0.12.
However, we have heard reports of people removing the
MAX_VALAC_VERSION check and the --fatal-warnings compiler flag in the
Makefile to compile Shotwell 0.11.2 with Vala 0.13 or 0.14. Don't do
this. We've just learned that, due to a change in the way that
structure parameters are passed, compiling Shotwell 0.11.2 with any
version of Vala later than 0.12 can introduce stability problems.

If you're building Shotwell from trunk, you can and should build it
with the latest version of Vala, 0.14. Note that there are still some
instabilities in trunk stemming from the issue described above, but
instabilities in the trunk development version of a product are
expected.

Regards,
Lucas