[Telepathy] choosing Telepathy versions for GNOME 3.12

[Simon McVittie]

It's GNOME freeze time, so it's about time for another round of
Telepathy stable releases. Development on master has been pretty slow
(maintainers busy elsewhere and/or focusing on trying to make 1.0
happen) so the changes are not very large.

Hopefully any distribution packagers who ship anything
newer/more-bleeding-edge than "latest stable release" already follow
this mailing list...

When we have consensus, we should contact distributor-list at gnome.org as
well as this list, like Guillaume did last time.

The tl;dr version is that I'm proposing:

telepathy-glib: new 0.24.x

telepathy-idle: keep 0.2.x, or new 0.3.x? (see below)
telepathy-logger: keep 0.8.x, or new 0.10.x? (see below)

telepathy-mission-control: keep 5.16.x
telepathy-gabble: keep 0.18.x
telepathy-salut: keep 0.8.x
telepathy-rakia: keep 0.8.x
telepathy-haze: keep 0.8.x
telepathy-farstream: keep 0.6.x

telepathy-glib
==============

0.23.x exists, and Guillaume has done a release candidate for 0.24. I
propose we release 0.24.0 and recommend 0.24.x.

telepathy-gabble
================

0.19.0 has not yet been released. It has a bunch of changes.

I think we should release 0.18.2, and recommend it.

telepathy-idle
==============

0.3.0 has not yet been released. The master branch implements the new
IRCCommand interface.

If real-world applications (Polari? Empathy?) depend on that interface,
we should release 0.3.0 as a release candidate now, and recommend 0.4.x
for GNOME 3.12. Otherwise, we should stick with 0.2.x.

telepathy-logger
================

0.9.0 has not yet been released. There is one new feature (ignorelist),
some fairly intrusive thread-safety fixes, and some smaller bugfixes
(memory leak fixes, enabling XML_PARSE_RECOVER).

I think this is the Empathy maintainers' decision, since it's the
biggest user: ship 0.9.0 as a release candidate now and recommend 0.10.x
for GNOME 3.12, or stick with 0.8.x and backport selected fixes? If we
stick to 0.8.x, I think at least XML_PARSE_RECOVER should be backported.

telepathy-mission-control
=========================

5.17.0 has not yet been released. The master branch has quite a lot of
refactoring, a C API break, and an on-disk format change for accounts.
It's unfortunate that we never did the release for this, but I don't
think it's sensible to declare it insta-stable without it having had
significant testing.

I think we should continue to recommend 5.16 for GNOME 3.12; if
distributors have unwisely upgraded to master despite the lack of a
release, they will have accounts in the new format and cannot safely
downgrade, but I think they get to keep both pieces in that situation.

We should make sure that telepathy-mission-control 6 can import accounts
from what-would-have-been-5.17.

The rest
========

There have been no new development releases since the versions we
recommended for GNOME 3.10, and there doesn't seem to be any pressing
reason to upgrade.

The future
==========

I would like to have Telepathy 1.0 stable well before GNOME 3.14
freezes; that hopefully means these will be the last round of Telepathy
0.x stable releases (although we might do a telepathy-glib 0.26 or
telepathy-mission-control 5.18 if necessary).

The major things left to do are:

* merge my port to GDBus, or decide not to
* implement MC 5 account import in MC 6
* make TpClientFactory the top-level object?
* start tracking the ABI properly

I don't think the Names and redesigned Avatars interfaces should be
blockers for 1.0.

Regards,
    S