[Vala] A suggestion for future releases

[Jim Nelson <jim yorba org>]

Geary 0.4.1 (released a little over a week ago) fails to compile with 
Vala 0.22.1. This is due to two changes in Vala:

* The libnotify binding change
* Vala 0.22.1 catches binding errors in WebKitGTK's .gir file that were 
not caught in 0.22.0.

These are documented at http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/7695 and 
http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/7694

These two issues forced us to release 0.4.2 for no other reason than to 
ensure we compile with the latest stable Vala. We had to include the 
libnotify VAPI in our tarball in order to compile with older versions.

I'd like to request that in the future changes in stable dot releases 
be more conservative in nature. Neither of the above changes seem truly 
critical to me (although perhaps they are to other projects; I'd like 
to hear why, though). The libnotify change was particularly troublesome 
because, while it fixes a memory leak, I'd be amazed if it was a real 
issue for any application. Geary calls Notify.get_server_caps() once, 
stores the result, and never calls it again.

My broad point is, dot releases for stable versions of Vala can cause 
large changes downstream. In the future, could these changes be more 
geared toward critical fixes?

-- Jim