Miguel de Icaza Criticizes Plans for Gtk+ 3

Miguel de Icaza doubts that work on the new release will be successful unless people take time to rethink the strategy. Just a couple of days after Gtk+ developer Kristian Rietveld revealed plans for a 3.0 version of the GUI toolkit and the desktop environment at the Gnome developer conference, Guadec, de Icaza fears a disaster. He says that the plans sound like a disaster, and that application developers were underrepresented when they were drafted. Icaza pleads for a clear roadmap and detailed definitions of the new features saying that it is not enough to mention features without explaining what they are.

At the same time, the Gnome founder and inventor of Mono criticizes plans for redeveloping the API. He fears multiple changes to the interfaces as there are currently no plans for reference implementations, not to mention working code. However, without this there could be no guarantees that changes would be compatible with applications and later releases would use a different API.

De Icaza is not entirely against the plans, but he does demand a clear roadmap, working code for the technologies, and above more discussions about the APIs in the developer community. On top of this, he sees the need for a transitional 2.x release that would give developers and distributors enough time to incorporate changes.