xfce 4.13 - stability and downstream packaging

[Simon Steinbeiß]

Hi Mukundan,

we have had a similar discussion within the Xubuntu development community and decided to upgrade the majority of components to 4.13 for the 18.10 release that's due in October.
You can easily see the outcome in what is being prepared for Xubuntu Cosmic, some of them with this search:
https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xfce&searchon=names&suite=cosmic&section=all

I'm not sure whether our rationale for which components to upgrade is still available anywhere (apart from individual irc logs), but in general we tried to focus on stability. One bigger discussion item was the xfconf migration.

Ideally this preliminary availability will also provide upstream Xfce with more testing for releasing 4.14.
But in the end you have to be ready to trade in a bit (though hopefully not much) of stability.

</my2cents>
Simon


> On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 1:11 AM Mukundan Ragavan <nonamedotc at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am one of the packagers maintaining a few Xfce components for Fedora.
> I recently proposed [1] updating our (Fedora) packages to 4.13.x
> versions in what is now rawhide and will become Fedora 29 in the near
> future [2]. I would like to check with upstream developers (hey guys!)
> before I start moving to devel versions and hence this email.
> 
> The benefit I see in moving is the all GTK-3 environment. The
> trepidation is regarding ABI/API stability/instability. Although 4.13.x
> has been mostly stable in my experience, is moving to the devel 4.13.x
> versions in what will be a stable Fedora release in ~6 months a bad
> idea? Please advise.
> 
> Thanks,
> Mukundan (nonamedotc).
> 
> [1]
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/xfce@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/QHRBUBHUMRPOX4KHCLWR436Z2RXKR4EG/
> [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/29/Schedule