[mjs7231]

This makes it sound like there is no plan. Rather than coming up with a defined API first, then implementing it through normal alpha, beta, rcs. They are just going to start writing whatever code at gtk4 and the stable version wont be until something like gtk4.xx based on whatever they decided to write.

And after gtk4.xx is released, are bug fixes supposed to happen on the newly unstable gtk5? -- I'm so confused.

[audidude]

Considering this was half a day at our first hackfest of the season, I'm not surprised it doesn't sound fully fleshed out. Nor should it be this early. I'm mostly just surprised how much steam it's picked up on the commentary sites.

But that said, it's not that we don't have a plan. We have a very concrete plan in moving to a GL renderer, render trees, shader-based CSS drawing, and more. However, that necessarily means breaking the imperative drawing model that has us stuck in 1998.

So what are we to do?

Version numbers are just a thing. I think semantic versioning makes people put a little bit more confidence in what they are than its worth, but we did discuss this quite a bit.

We have a few options, some of which might be a "gtk-4-unstable.pc" pkg-config, or bumping soname more (but if we do that, why not bump the major number too), etc etc. We are all long term Free Software veterans maintaining long running ABI software projects. We are certainly thinking about the consequences of our choices from a developer, user, and distributor viewpoint.

[mbreese]

Version numbers are just a thing

Yes, and they should mean something. Not having a fixed API/ABI for an entire major version goes against what everyone else thinks that version numbers mean. You can talk yourself into thinking that the numbers don't matter - that only the semantic versioning (whatever that is) matters. But that doesn't mean that everyone else will agree, let alone understand what the hell you're talking about.

[audidude]

The situation with 4.0 not being 4.x is most certainly the most contentious part of the discussion so far. It is also subject to change (it's only been a few hours so far of us discussing this).

That said, if we can't guarantee the minor versions as we drain the swamp to rebuild this toolkit into something modern, we either need to not release anything (which makes it very hard to build if you can't get users to test things) or we need to come up with alternate versioning schemes.

[mbreese]

I was always a fan of the older linux model: x.1 = unstable, x.2 = stable, x.3 = unstable, x.4 = stable.

Really, the reason why this strikes a chord is that it is confusing as hell. What is the rationale behind not allowing a 4.2 project to be built once 4.4 is installed on the system? That is the truly confusing part. Are you expecting that many backwards incompatible changes between 4.2 and 4.4? Why do the headers and packages need to share the same namespace?

I'm sure a lot of thought went into this, but something just doesn't seem right to me...

[audidude]

> I was always a fan of the older linux model: x.1 = unstable, x.2 = stable, x.3 = unstable, x.4 = stable.

This certainly came up in our discussions... I think many people were left with a bad taste in their mouths due to trying to decode Linux version numbers. In my opinion, anything that has an actual decode algorithm would be better than the current situation of ... i dunno? :)

> Really, the reason why this strikes a chord is that it is confusing as hell. What is the rationale behind not allowing a 4.2 project to be built once 4.4 is installed on the system? That is the truly confusing part. Are you expecting that many backwards incompatible changes between 4.2 and 4.4? Why do the headers and packages need to share the same namespace?

I think this was miscommunication to be honest.

The installation headers for 4.0, 4.2, 4.4, etc will not be parallel installable based on the current idea. So when your distribution upgrades to 4.4, anything you compile against the -devel headers will be for 4.4. However, if they keep the previous soname version for 4.2, I don't see any reason that program couldn't keep working.

Of course, we could try to discover the ABI incompatabilities with libabigail, but history has shown us (over the last couple years) that there is a lot to ABI breakage that has nothing to do with symbols. Theming, expected behavior...

> I'm sure a lot of thought went into this, but something just doesn't seem right to me...

We certainly appreciate feedback. We are trying to be reponsive on irc.gimp.net #gtk+ during the hackfest, and your concerns will be relayed to the group. We are a fairly small group of about a dozen people, but gtk+ is important to us and we care about improving things.