GNOME's GTK Developers Come Up With A Plan For GTK+ 4

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME's GTK Developers Come Up With A Plan For GTK+ 4

At a GTK+ hackfest this week the developers have come up with a new plan for delivering major releases of the GTK+ tool-kit every two years, e.g. GTK4, GTK5, GTK6, etc...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-2016-GTK4-Ahead

[cl333r]

I think their plan is not confusing enough.

[dh04000]

I think their plan is not confusing enough.

They should remove some features to make it easier and less cluttered.

[tessio]

As part of this more rapid evolution of GTK, the API will not initially be stable. Between say GTK 4.0 and GTK 4.2, the API can break, but around the GTK x.6 release is when they would call themselves API/ABI stable.

This makes no sense.

[TumultuousUnicorn]

GTK 3.20 breaks API, a GTK 4.0 instead would have been better. A lot of GTK+ themes are broken with a new version of GTK, GTK 3.x is not stable.
I hope they'll do a stable API, e.g. no deprecated symbols on minor releases, no theme breaking, or something like else... Only improvements.

[Ericg]

GTK 3.20 breaks API, a GTK 4.0 instead would have been better. A lot of GTK+ themes are broken with a new version of GTK, GTK 3.x is not stable.
I hope they'll do a stable API, e.g. no deprecated symbols on minor releases, no theme breaking, or something like else... Only improvements.

The problem with that argument is that the devs screamed from the rafters that the Theme API was unstable. Theme devs knew that, but users didn't. If your use case relies on explicitly unstable APIs, then you really can't complain when they break.

[ssokolow]

This sort of confusing, over-complicated mess is why I've started preparing to migrate my creations from GTK+ 2.x to Qt 5.x rather than GTK+ 3.x+. (And why LXQt is the successor to LXDE)

I just want to write applications. I don't want to play guinea-pig for their API experiments and then only be guaranteed the UI assumptions baked into their default theme because they scared away or wore out 3rd-party theme developers.

[oleid]

Themes are not and have never been covered by gtk's abi / api stability promise. That said, I find it very confusing, too, that the api may break between minor releases. That lowers attractivity for non-gnome developers. Nevertheless, you can always target a x.6 release instead a brand new. And considering they are supposed to be part of LTS releases, this is what is going to happen.

[Mystro256]

This makes no sense.

GCC's version scheme makes more sense than this.

Not sure why they can't have a stable version every 4 years (most LTS releases are every 4 years), supply 6 month bug fixes, and then having a rolling development branch.
So, 4.0 as stable, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 as bugfixes, then 4.99 can be rolling until the 5.0 release...

Or something like that :/

[Palu Macil]

I think I agree with most the other comments here... Nothing special is signified by x.6 usually. It'll be a versioning scheme unique to them, and I anticipate confusion. There's no reason to simply have a 4.0 that advances to 4.1 etc for only necessary bug fixes AND release a 5.0beta at the same time which takes on new features and allows breakage of compatibility. The x.6 thing just won't be understood easily.