Notes from the meeting

Topic: What is everybody working on?

Emmanuele: long tail of a11y stuff, relations properties and states for existing widgets, treeview

Matthias: working on paths with Benjamin, implementing a path editor in the style of Inkscape

Christian: working on OS X backend, cairo rendering is working fine, OpenGL textures still no-go, input modifiers need to be sorted out, dnd and clipboard somewhat work. The GL renderer is missing synchronization

Benjamin: path rendering. original idea: replace cairo stroke and fill, implement lottie and svg, bottom-up. Also working with Jonas on surface resizing and integrating that with the frame clock

Carlos: Activation protocol for wayland, missing touch support for webkit

Adrien: tabs widget, flat widget (overlay/sidebar combination) in libhandy

Allan: planning to work new version of the hig this cycle, together with the new libhandy

Topic: Schedule for 4.x/5

3.99.5 next week - should be a release candidate, mainly for getting remaining annotation fixes landed 4.0 on December 16

Release readiness checklist

• update for website is staged in the gtk4-prep branch, can be landed at any time
• Matthias will start sketing a 4.0 blog post, Emmanuele has a "who wrote 4.0" post drafted
• Emmanuele will talk to the engagement team for publicity
• Outstanding items
  • switch OS X back to cairo (Christian)
  • look if we want to land some of Jonas window resizing code - it has api changes (Benjamin)
• do a final 2.x release (Matthias)
• do another 3.x release (Matthias
• make a list of ported apps and libraries
• get a flatpak runtime with 4.0
• walk through examples in the docs and make sure they're uptodate (Matthias)

ebassi will look at decomissioning developer.gnome.org and do something else (after 4.0)

What to do after 4.0 will depend on the kind of feedback we get. Options

• 4.2 for GNOME 40
• 4.2 for GNOME 41

We also need to watch the feedback before making concrete GTK5 plans, so we will give ourselves until the summer before making a concrete roadmap. In the meantime, we can stage 5.0 material like:

• paths
• layout nodes

But we don't want to distract people with discussing 5.0 plans at this point. The messaging for 4.0 should focus on exciting things in 4.0:

• easy video support
• shaders
• easy composite widgets
• easy drawing, effects
• possibly faster rendering on devices like phones

Would be nice to get some measurements on the last point from the purism side (Adrian)

Topic: Dependencies

cairo - Bryce showed up on the mailing list, so we may be able to get a release after all. Will follow up after the meeting. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2020-November/029085.html

gtk-doc - we did a stopgap release to handle the custom syntax we have, ebassi is working on a replacement, but not on the 4.0 timeline. He wants to get his work out 'right after 4.0 is done'. This would also get rid again of the pandoc depencency that we grew for markdown recently.

gdk-pixbuf - not a very pressing issue. image library apis are still terrible, so using them directly is not pleasant. Still, we want to get rid of GdkPixbuf in our api for GTK 5.

Some discussion about pango and possible changes in a pango 2.0: Benjamin wants css styling for text. And PangoLayout could just be a next-gen label widget?

Misc. discussion

Some discussion about circular dependencies when implementing lottie and svg outside of gtk, but using gsk rendering machinery machinery.

Some discussion about the future of icon themes - with iconkit, maybe the icon theme code can go away in GTK 5

For ui files, the sentiment is that we need a separate format to do more extensive things, like embed code snipplets.

Topic: Animations

We will revisit this in another meeting, when Georges is around.

Topic: Accessibility

We've already covered whats left:

• treeview
• other platforms

Emmanuele considers another backend a 4.2 topic. There is some prior work by Alberto Ruiz on OS X, and prior gtk2 work by Microsoft.

Topc: UI designer

Christian would like to do another round of research on what people are use and like. Envisions a 'stencil pack' approach that goes a bit beyond a 'hig library' and can be used by designers. This is related to 'future of ui files' discussion. We will revisit this in another meeting.

Follow

We decided to continue discussion in another meeting. Emmanuele will send a doodle.