Status of GTK+3 transition

[Landry Breuil]

On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 10:47 AM, Klaas van Schelven
<klaas at vanschelven.com> wrote:
> Hello XFCE Developers,
>
> I tried to find answers to the below on your site but couldn't find
> anything; if they exist and my google-foo is lacking please just point me to
> them.

https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap (granted, the date is off,
but the full progress of various components is at the bottom)

> I'm trying to figure out how stable the transition to GTK+3 is.
>
> So far I've found the following:
>
> The first version of Xfce that contained GTK+3 components was Xfce 4.12,
> released on February 28, 2015. Also there's this discussion on moving
> forward to Xfce 4.14, which talks of a full transition to GTK+3.

It's already quite in good shape, see previous link.

> Is Xfce 4.12 considered stable? Will 4.14 be considered stable once it's
> released? (I'm asking because of the word "transitional" used to describe it
> in some places).

Xfce 4.12 is stable, Xfce 4.14 will be considered stable when it's released.

> Is there any kind of support policy, or are users & distributions basically
> expected to upgrade relatively quickly to the newest versions?

If you look at https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce-announce/
archives, you'll see that lots of 4.12 components got bugfix/point
releases since 4.12.0. Once 4.14 is released, bugfixes should
concentrate on that 4.14 branch, there's not enough manpower to
maintain two branches with totally different base components..

As for stability, some distros started shipping parts of Xfce using
already-migrated-to-gtk3 components, most of the developers are
running Gtk3 versions of components (4.13.something, considered
'development releases'), bugs are being squashed out, and (to me) it's
usable daily. YMMV.

Landry