New thoughts are being expressed about Gtk+ versioning.
There is something about numbering. Whatever. The numbering of Gtk+ versions is a problem I do not have. A problem I do not expect to have. Hence “whatever”.
But there is also a message about stability and it is a scary one.
A cynical reading or, one might claim, any reading consistent with persistent prior behaviour, would come to the conclusion that the Gtk+ team wants to be released from all responsibility of medium and long term stability. If, for no good reason, they feel like breaking the scroll wheel behaviour of all applications again then evidently so be it.
But maybe that is too dark a view. There is some hint that there will be something that is stable. I just do not see how the versioning plan can possibly provide that.
What is missing from the plan is a way to make things stable. A snapshot at a semi-random time does not do it. Specifically, in order to provide stability of the “stable” release, I believe that a 3-6 months long period before or after the stable release is declared should be devoted exclusively to making the release stable. Bug fixes, automated tests, running with Valgrind, Coverity, gcc -fsanitize=undef, bug triaging, etc. No new feature work.
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.