Xfce 4.10 release situation

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hi folks,

yesterday, I noticed that Fedora 16 has thunar 1.3.0 packaged instead
of a stable version like 1.2.0. Asking for the reasons behind that, I
was told that Xfce 4.10 will be out soon anyway and so the unstable
package would only be shipped for a couple of weeks/months, but not for
long. 

So far my opinion on this matter was to not release 4.10 until we have
achieved some more more noticeable goals from the roadmap on
http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.10/roadmap. But we could as well go ahead
and release 4.10 in March, and postpone the unfinished 4.10 roadmap
items to 4.12. It's not really an issue, 4.10 wouldn't be worse than
4.8 and the effort that is required to make 4.10 releases will not be
too high.

The only thing I fear really is that we will more or less immediately
stop support for Xfce 4.8 once 4.10 has been released (we simply have
not enough resources to maintain 4.8, 4.10 and development versions at
the same time). It occurs to me that a lot of people have only
recently switched to Xfce 4.8 and so, releasing 4.10 and dropping
support for 4.8 will make the road a bit bumpy for them (and packagers
required to offer long term support as well).

I'm interested in hearing opinions about this. Somehow, I feel that we
should not let unfinished feature implementations stop us from pushing
out 4.10, as this is how it was intended to be: always be ready for a
release from master and do not hold releases back due to unfinished
tasks (unless they break everything else).

So, what do you think?

  - Jannis