Xfce 4.10 release situation

[Natanael Copa]

On Fri, 18 Nov 2011 10:51:05 +0000
Jannis Pohlmann <jannis at xfce.org> wrote:

> Hi folks,
... 
> 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).

As distro maintainer, I am more concerned about gtk3 support than
supporting 4.8.x. As long someone accepts security fixes and pushes
those to the git tree (so we distro maintainers can find those) then I
think everything should be fine.

As someone else mentioned more and more packages drops gtk2 support. I
already have an issue with gvfs and gnome-disk-utility (which I
understand is needed for USB plugging support in thunar) so I am more
interested in getting started with gtk3 than having more "interesting"
features.

> 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).

I tend to agree with this. This is in the direction of time based
release, a concept that I think works fairly well. OTOH, I think good
time for time based releases is in march-april/sept-oct since many
mayor distros aim for April/Oct.

Oh, Ubuntu will do a LTS in april 2012. I don't think a long time
support release with gtk2 is a good idea.

> So, what do you think?

I am in favor for dropping features to get 4.10 out soon.

Thanks!

-nc