GTK+ 4.0 Targeted For Its Initial Release This Fall, GTK+ 5.0 Development To Follow

[tessio]

I don't think porting to GTK 4 will start until the release of GTK 4.8. This is when GTK4 will be declared stable. Given their current schedule of a release every 6 months it would take until fall 2020 for GTK devs to recommend GTK4 for third party developers.
Together with GTK 4.8 there will also be a release of GTK5, for which same things apply. It would take until 5.8 until they recommend GTK5 to third-party developers.
That's how GTK's new release cycle is supposed to work.
Less or even no breaking changes from X.8 on, because the breaking changes will happen on the Y.0 branch instead.

The plan is that third-party devs will only start porting to a new branch after it has been declared stable with the X.8 release, which means you'll start working on a port ~2 years after the first version of a new branch came out.

So the short answer is yes, it will take a long time to port to GTK4.
However, it should take less than the 5 years for XFCE. A new branch will become stable much faster than GTK3 did, so there will be less overall changes from one branch to the next.

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. GTK4 will be stable this year when it arrives. All major/breaking changes will go into GTK4.90 (i.e GTK5 development branch).

[waxhead]

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. GTK4 will be stable this year when it arrives. All major/breaking changes will go into GTK4.90 (i.e GTK5 development branch).

Only testing and usage determines when a program is stable. A date is not much worth on it's own.

This version hysteria is absolutely nuts as well. In the good old days you had version, revision, fix where version mean that it was a completely new product and was perhaps not backward compatible. Revision meant new features, but usually backwards compatible. Fix was either a,b,c or a number and you would instantly know by looking at the complete version string what it was. These days are over for some reason, if people are jumping versions like crazy they might as well just go for year.month (.day) which would suffice if you want big numbers to make an impression that your application is more mature than it really is!

[UpsetingFact]

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about.

Ah, the very same "argument" that people use when they have deep unability to explain things... Oh wait, that's because there's nothing to explain !

Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is ?
Well, Insanity is, doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again, expecting shit to change.

And it's pretty insane that such people are still sucking their own dicks for so long and still be able to walk.

[UpsetingFact]

Only testing and usage determines when a program is stable. A date is not much worth on it's own.

Worst thing is, this also has a well-known name among -serious- developers: Product Maturity through Software Testing/Unit testing.

Guess they're showing how incompetent and how far they are from being real developpers after all...

[tessio]

Ah, the very same "argument" that people use when they have deep unability to explain things... Oh wait, that's because there's nothing to explain !

Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is ?
Well, Insanity is, doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again, expecting shit to change.

And it's pretty insane that such people are still sucking their own dicks for so long and still be able to walk.

In the end of the day I am wright and you are a lunatic sparrow repeating "cool quotes" thinking it makes you less stupid.

[UpsetingFact]

In the end of the day I'm right and you are a dellusional sparrow repeating bullshit thinking it makes you less stupid.

But hey, still considering 4.8 as the real stable release instead of making it 4.0 as it should be right ?

[schmidtbag]

I seriously hope that GTK5 does not break compatibility with GTK4, otherwise, what the hell do they think they're doing? GTK4 is fresh and barely used, and it's already obsolete? Why even release GTK4? As others have stated, there's still a lot out there that hasn't been ported to GTK3.

Though I personally never had major gripes with GTK, I know a lot of people who show disapproval. It's stuff like this why that's the case. I get the impression that it isn't easy porting from one version to the next, which can be a real turnoff. Qt, meanwhile, is relatively easy to port. I once created a program in Qt4+Python involving thousands of lines of code, and it took me just a few hours to port it to Qt5. Pretty much all of the important and well-maintained KDE apps were ported to Qt5 in a relatively short amount of time. Meanwhile, applications like LibreOffice, GIMP, and Firefox have been taking years to transition to GTK3.

Breakage of backward compatibility is fine if it means everything will improve because of it, but if GTK5 breaks compatibility with predecessors, that's just due to negligence as far as I'm concerned.

[arakan94]

In the end of the day I'm right and you are a dellusional sparrow repeating bullshit thinking it makes you less stupid.

But hey, still considering 4.8 as the real stable release instead of making it 4.0 as it should be right ?

What are you talking about? Have you read the blog post they made about versioning changes? The 4.0 is going to be the stable release (meaning no API-breaking changes in subsequent minor releases). They already did the unstable releases (3.90, 3.92, ...)

[UpsetingFact]

Look after what Degra said, plus considering that Gnome 3 only got stable until 3.22.
That's expectations vs reality, and I'm not falling for that again unless 4.0 gets at the very least 95% stable and 99% staged.

I seriously hope that GTK5 does not break compatibility with GTK4, otherwise, what the hell do they think they're doing? GTK4 is fresh and barely used, and it's already obsolete? Why even release GTK4? As others have stated, there's still a lot out there that hasn't been ported to GTK3.

Though I personally never had major gripes with GTK, I know a lot of people who show disapproval. It's stuff like this why that's the case. I get the impression that it isn't easy porting from one version to the next, which can be a real turnoff. Qt, meanwhile, is relatively easy to port. I once created a program in Qt4+Python involving thousands of lines of code, and it took me just a few hours to port it to Qt5. Pretty much all of the important and well-maintained KDE apps were ported to Qt5 in a relatively short amount of time. Meanwhile, applications like LibreOffice, GIMP, and Firefox have been taking years to transition to GTK3.

Breakage of backward compatibility is fine if it means everything will improve because of it, but if GTK5 breaks compatibility with predecessors, that's just due to negligence as far as I'm concerned.

That's because of Google's versionning way.
They're going rolling-release without saying it, because everyone would understand that it's a bug-prone versioning way.
And unfortunately, a lot of people are folling them in their maddness.

And GTK is also going full rolling-release.
So if you want a stable Gnome, wait at the very least for GTK 5.0 release. Problems on 4.8 -which should be 4.0-, should be fixed then.


As a rule of thumb when you're using such rolling-released/Betas-to-Manufacture softwares, the real stable versions are some point releases after X.0.
Debian's are X.3 since Wheezy, Ubuntu's are X.04.1, Windows 10's 1607, Android 5.0's are 6.0.1, KDE 5's 5.8, Gnome 3's 3.22, etc

Looking after softwares' enterprise versions are pretty much the way to spot when they are really stable.
Times spent on Alphas and Betas before actual release also says a lot. If they don't spend 6 months (OS components, OSes, games,etc) at the very least after the last Beta for a big software, it'll pretty much tells you that things are still buggy.

[Vistaus]

I wonder how GTK4 will fare regarding performance.

Each new GTK+ major release regressed quite a bit (well from a bit to significantly) performance wise (except for GTK-2.8, where the introduction of the cairo rendering backend also caused performance regressions). Now wonder - there is no automated nightly/regression testing in place - so the influence on performance of new features and refactorings of the existing code base is quite often unnoticed - untile someone complains in bugzilla a year later when the code finally hits stable distributions.

Nah, when it hits stable distributions, people don't complain 'cause users of stable or LTS distributions don't know how to report bugs. Or so I was told over @ OMG! Ubuntu.