0.29.0 Release planning

[kchibisov]

Essential patches

The next winit release will have some massive reworks of internals and API, and such reworks are pretty huge. To make it less painful this issue to help organize the work on the following massive PRs to simplify the life for everyone else.

The main thing of the next release will be #2662 (keyboard input v2).

Given that, any non trivial changes and changes to public API are blocked until it'll be merged.

After keyboard input v2 the backends will be unblocked from further development, except Wayland and maybe X11 ones, for them see:

• - Update wayland-rs to 0.30.0 #2676 ; Wayland backend rewrite for wayland-rs 0.30, which is essential for forward compatibility with the protocol.
• - internal: Add libxcb and replace some Xlib functions #2614 ; Rewrite of X11 backend to be more maintainable and safer. This one is optional, but we'll see how it goes

Any updates to them will be discarded entirely if they come in the wrong time. This statement will hold for Wayland for sure, and maybe in more relaxed form for X11.

Actual release

Given that the amount of non-trivial changes to the next release, we might consider doing RC process, because both Wayland/X11 backends could be not in really usable state and something from them could be missing. We might also want the ability to breaking change new keyboard.

Side notes

The state of readiness for the next release will be tracked via milestones and separate issues. This issue is solely a notice for other maintainers/contributors about temporary shifted focus and API freeze.

[kchibisov]

The Wayland patch got merged, so it's now unfrozen for hot fixes.

[kchibisov]

As a soft deadline I'd say 0.29 will be in the end of July, beginning of August (2023).

Given that's all open source development, things will likely change a bunch of times.

[kchibisov]

The freeze is now removed. The release is still being planned on Augest(maybe July) so we can polish the bugs/internal changes.

[maroider]

I think going for a release candidate could be useful, but I guess we'll have a better idea closer to a potential release.

[kchibisov]

Yeah, we probably have an rc series for the 0.29 however I'll do it closer to release anyway(end of June). I know that neovide is using the keyboard input actively so they should give us a good information wrt the bugs present.

[kchibisov]

Given that multiple big projects(bevy/neovide) are using winit from master and I personally want to use winit in alacritty development as well. There will be betas for the upcoming release.

Betas will represent snapshots from winit development branch and flow into v0.29.0 release. I'll start betas within a week or two.

[kchibisov]

beta.0 is done.

[kchibisov]

The release is getting delayed until the end of the August, because there're still some features needed to be implemented and we'd need a beta2 test drive.