Manjaro release announcement misunderstanding

[Steve Dodier-Lazaro]

Hey Rob,

Thanks for the message. I'm the person who manages the Twitter
@xfceofficial and am behind /u/sidnioulz on Reddit and sidi on IRC. My talk
on IRC/Reddit is mostly in my name, though I did tweet to @ManjaroLinux to
indicate the issue (and to act as a statement to followers that the release
has not been made yet):

  @ManjaroLinux you are not shipping 4.12 since we did not release it. Your
ChangeLog for Xfce 4.12 is also very incomplete.

Now, to clarify, I have made this move in order to preemptively avoid some
potential side effects:
- outlets like Softpedia who write articles too quickly and convey the
meaning that Xfce 4.12 has been released
- testers/users of Manjaro thinking that Xfce 4.12 is released (even though
Manjaro 0.9.0 is a development version, the statement title implies it uses
a stable, released Xfce 4.12) and noticing more missing translations /
hitting critical bugs than we had expected, since a bunch of commits are
still happening (over 30 of our projects had been updated within 48 hours
of your announcement, for instance)
- third party users/trolls complaining that Manjaro gets to have 4.12
before the others, or some idiocies of the sort because some people
actually believe Xfce has a secret agenda to work only with some distros
(evidenced by private comments I occasionally get about how we have all
become evil Xubuntu developers, etc.)
- people might think there is less to 4.12 than there actually is. The
actual changelog is massive :-)

Also, just like you wouldn't want people to present Manjaro 0.9.0 as
Manjaro 1.0, we like the names and versions of our products to be kept
intact :-)

The primary reason why I care about this is that it can end up wasting some
of our developers/members' time dealing with silly queries, comments,
complaints, etc. Now given the scope of the issue, I felt no need to go and
complain to your IRC channel, expecting that whomever manages your public
announcements would catch my Tweet and errata the release announcement
title to avoid the confusion.

I think the best way to prevent any sort of silly issue is for all
distributors to respect the versions we use. If you want to convey the
meaning to your users that you're presenting them with what essentially is
a RC1, by all means do tell us a few days in advance / help us a bit with
packaging and we can provide a RC1. I believe there was talk of doing this
(albeit the exceptional nature of 4.12 warranted a quick release since it
had just been delayed for too long already, hence the lack of RC --
correct, Simon?). This way, you have the flashy version number and we have
the user expectations we expect to create!

By the way, it'd also be great to have a Manjaro developer (or more!) on
the Xfce development mailing list. It's not such a massive amount of emails
and it helps a lot to keep in touch with us and provide a helping hand when
we most need it.

Cheers,
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