Xfce 4.10 release situation

[Nick Schermer]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Jannis Pohlmann <jannis at xfce.org> wrote:
> 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.

Haha, suckers ;-) Never use 4.$odd packages until the first pre-release.

> 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).

We already released a whole bunch of 4.8.x stable packages and I think
4.8 is in a good shape. Practically we never release 4.($stable-2)
packages after 4.$stable, so it will make no difference if we
officially announce this.

> 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).

Of course, but atm there is not much interesting in 4.10-master,
therefore we postponed till march.

Nick