[Xfce 4.12] Roadmap and Features

[Stephan Arts]

On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Vladimir Kravets <vova.kravets at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I would like to propose some improvement in release schedule about moving to
> gtk3 and so on.
>
> Since we have a lot of questions and not for all is not clear how it will be
> with new gtk3 engine I want to propose such thing:
>
> Since it very hard work for release in this case some of developer changed
> major version of product. In our case:
> 4.x will be connected to gtk2
> 5.x will be connected to gtk3

Almost correct:
  4.10 will be connected to gtk2
  4.12 will be connected to gtk3

> Implementing plan:
> 1. Create new branch 4.x which will have have dep to gtk2.
> This branch will exists only for support there are no new features in it,
> only bug fixing.

This branch exists, it is the 4.10 branch.

> 2. In master (version 5.x) add dep to gtk3 and continue developing with new
> gtk3 engine and all related work for porting plugins and so on to use new
> engine.

These will be separate gtk3 branches that will be merged into master
once the porting is complete. (see release-process[0])

> In this case:
> 1. We will have latest working XFCE with gtk2 with all high/urgent fixes.
> 2. We will have ability to release 4.x version in any time
> 3. We will have working (for dev) release for 5.x to have ability to
> implement/port new/old features and check it.

Correct, this is precisely what we have (without 5, we don't go to 5
yet). See [1]

> Minuses:
> 1. Need time and resources to maintained 2 versions
> 2. As I know in git repository we have different repositories for each
> component thus need to understood how to organized this(two branches 4.x and
> 5.x) in git.
>
> When the 5.x version will be stable we can drop supporting of 4.x version
> and working only in master.
>
> Any comments/suggestion/ideas about this?

As always, we develop one version and maintain another.

4.10 is stable

4.12 is under development and will be ported to gtk-3 (development
versions leading to 4.12 will be labeled 4.11.x)

Kind regards,

-
Stephan


[0] http://www.xfce.org/about/releasemodel
[1] http://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/2011-November/029342.html