Pango 1.44 Is Coming Thanks To The Revival By GNOME Developers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Pango 1.44 Is Coming Thanks To The Revival By GNOME Developers

Back in May there were the plans shared by Red Hat's Matthias Clasen to work out some improvements to the Pango layout engine library after going fairly stale in recent years. That work is coming to fruition with a Pango 1.44 release looking like it will be here soon with new features...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Pango-1.44-Coming-Soon

[jacob]

Many parts of the GNOME stack have seen exciting developments lately but there is still the elephant in the room, and it's not technological. It's that the GTK project absolutely has to fix its release process. The 3.x cycle has been managed so badly that even though the tech itself has always been good, it will take a lot more than announcements and promises to win back the trust of third party developers.

[Britoid]

Many parts of the GNOME stack have seen exciting developments lately but there is still the elephant in the room, and it's not technological. It's that the GTK project absolutely has to fix its release process. The 3.x cycle has been managed so badly that even though the tech itself has always been good, it will take a lot more than announcements and promises to win back the trust of third party developers.

What's wrong with the release process?

[DanL]

Let me put on my contrarian troll hat and ask why they don't let it R.I.P., like debianxfce ?

[skeevy420]

Many parts of the GNOME stack have seen exciting developments lately but there is still the elephant in the room, and it's not technological. It's that the GTK project ...

adopted CSD and header bars.

FTFM.

[jacob]

What's wrong with the release process?

GTK 3.x was put out before it was sufficiently mature. Both API and ABI compatibility was broken several times during the supposedly stable release series, theming support was revamped in a way that broke both applications and existing themes, for a while documentation did not correspond to the actual software implementation etc. It was a big mess and they can't afford to repeat it.

[Guest]

GTK 3.x was put out before it was sufficiently mature. Both API and ABI compatibility was broken several times during the supposedly stable release series, theming support was revamped in a way that broke both applications and existing themes, for a while documentation did not correspond to the actual software implementation etc. It was a big mess and they can't afford to repeat it.

Yep. They should have kept compatibility when releasing next minor versions, and begin deprecating mistakes in design. Then release gnome 4 as refined and cleaned-up gnome 3. It would be less annoying for users and extension developers, when they just need to fix / check things when going to next major version.

[Britoid]

GTK 3.x was put out before it was sufficiently mature. Both API and ABI compatibility was broken several times during the supposedly stable release series, theming support was revamped in a way that broke both applications and existing themes, for a while documentation did not correspond to the actual software implementation etc. It was a big mess and they can't afford to repeat it.

Oh yeh, I get that. GNOME doesn't really care about themes so I don't think there's reason to surprised at themes breaking, they're never going to be stable due to how they work now.

[rastersoft]

GTK 3.x was put out before it was sufficiently mature. Both API and ABI compatibility was broken several times during the supposedly stable release series, theming support was revamped in a way that broke both applications and existing themes, for a while documentation did not correspond to the actual software implementation etc. It was a big mess and they can't afford to repeat it.

I was prepared to read some stupid comment, but this time it is something completely true, and you are right: Gtk 3.x failed to follow their own rules (no API/ABI break during minor updates, only deprecation) and that messed up a lot of projects.

Fortunately, AFAIK, the new release scheme fixes that.

[jacob]

Oh yeh, I get that. GNOME doesn't really care about themes so I don't think there's reason to surprised at themes breaking, they're never going to be stable due to how they work now.

Personally I don't really care about themes either and if the devs said that the whole thing is deprecated and should not be used in n new developments, that would be fine with me. But you can't just decide to redesign an officially supported feature in the middle of a stable release cycle, do it out of the blue and without any firm plan as to where it is heading to anyway.