Plans for 3.0.0

[John Bailey]

Hi all,

I know I just e-mailed about plans for 2.8.0.  In that e-mail I pointed out that
in my ideal world, 2.8.0 will be the last 2.x series for us.  That's because I
want to push out 3.0.0 on September 10.  So, here's my plan.

I want to start an im.pidgin.pidgin.next.major branch soon (sometime in the next
7 days).  In this branch we'll first kill off all deprecated API in what is now
our current codebase.  Once that is complete, we need to get the keyring and
logging SoC stuff merged in.  During this time, we should not at all be afraid
to change UI concepts or terminologies (such as s/PurpleContact/PurplePerson/
and s/PurpleBuddy/PurpleContact/ as has been bandied about a few times).

A would-be-nice item is the webkit stuff.  I'm not sure if this is realistic to
fit in the timeframe, but if we can squeeze it in, I'm all for it.

Finally, I'd like to allow UIs to tell libpurple what configuration directory to
use, so Adium, Instantbird, etc. can simply indicate their libpurple config
directory during libpurple initialization.  This would allow Vulture (if it ever
gets completed), for example, to use %APPDATA%\Vulture instead of
%APPDATA%\.purple on Windows.

Once all that is done, we'll string freeze for 21 days prior to releasing on
September 10 (this means the freeze would start on August 20).  I'd love to get
more stuff in, particularly gobjectification, but I don't think it's realistic
for 6 months' work.

Additionally, I'd like to move to a significantly more modern GTK+ and Glib when
we do this.  Preferably whatever 2.x minors are current at the time.  (Right now
that would put us on GLib 2.28.x and GTK+ 2.24.0.)  Since we'll be changing our
soname from libpurple.so.0 to libpurple.so.1 at this point, distributions won't
have much room to complain, as most won't pick up the new version in existing
distro releases anyway.

I'm also inclined to say that if we break something such that a 3.0.0 .purple
can't be used at all by a previous version, we shouldn't lose any sleep over it.
 It's a bit nuts, in my opinion, to expect to take the same config directory and
use it with more than one major version of the application.

John

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