halting problem :: Long term support for GTK+

:: ~1 min read

I hate turning my blog into a comment section, but some times it's warranted when people that should know better, but evidently don't care, just spout baseless accusations

Dear Morten,

A belief that achieving stability can be done after most of the paid contributors have run off to play with new toys is delusional. The record does not support it.

The record (in terms of commit history) seems to not support your position — as much as you think everyone else is “delusional” about it, the commit log does not really lie.

The 2.24.0 release was cut in January, 2011 — five and half years ago. No new features, no new API. Precisely what would happen with the new release plan, except that the new plan would also give a much better cadence to this behaviour.

Since then, the 2.24 branch — i.e. the “feature frozen” branch has seen 873 commits (as of this afternoon, London time), and 30 additional releases.

Turns out that people are being paid to maintain feature-frozen branches because that’s where the “boring” bits are — security issues, stability bugs, etc. Volunteers are much more interested in getting the latest and greatest feature that probably does not interest you now, but may be requested by your users in two years.

Isn’t it what you asked multiple times? A “long term support” release that gives you time to port your application to a stable API that has seen most of the bugs and uncertainty already squashed?

gtk lts

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