[Gtk-sharp-list] Update and 2.x Roadmap

[Mike Kestner]

Miguel and I have been discussing the future plans for Gtk# recently,
and I figured I'd update everyone on the current train of thought.

As you are aware, we have stable bindings in the field for the Gtk/GNOME
2.2 API, and people have been doing incredible things with them.  We
encourage people writing production applications to continue using 1.0.x
and we will continue to provide bugfix releases for critical problems as
they are identified.  I am trying to ensure all relevant bugfixes are
backported from trunk to the 1.0 branch.

We have made substantial progress toward a Gtk-2.4/GNOME-2.6 binding on
trunk and the 1.9.x release series.  I will be rolling another release
tarball for 1.9.x shortly.  Trunk has recently seen some important fixes
for things like string encoding issues and native calling convention
which were reeking havoc with our win32 MS runtime portability.  At this
point, I am not aware of any win32 specific issues outstanding with
trunk.

In addition, there has been progress on the memory management front.
Unfortunately, this has introduced some instability at the moment with
callback parameters of methods.  I'm in the process of auditing all the
methods that take callbacks as parameters to determine their persistence
scope and hand coding replacements where necessary.  If you want to help
out with this effort, please try your apps against trunk and report any
crashes to bugzilla and I'll get fixes into trunk pronto.

Once I've finished my audit of the callbacks, I plan to release another
1.9.x tarball, which we will be calling an unstable preview release and
Novell will be packaging it.  This will probably be the last release
targeting the Gtk-2.4 platform, but that is not set in stone yet.

After the release, we will be adding a Gtk-2.6 dependency to trunk.
There are no current plans to branch for the existing Gtk-2.4 API. The
next stable release of Gtk# will most likely be called version 2.6.0 and
the plan is to ship it alongside mono 1.2 later this year.

I think this will please most people, since we have fallen a little
behind the pace on the release treadmill, and people are already
clamoring for the new goodies in Gtk 2.6.  We have a nice solid stable
release in the field for people to target in the meantime, while we
catch up, and if people want to play with the 2.4 API without taking on
the 2.6 dependency right away, the upcoming 1.9.x preview release should
be a solid, although API unstable, release to play with until more
distros are shipping Gtk 2.6.  
 
-- 
Mike Kestner <mkestner@novell.com>