Next GNUstep release?

[Fred Kiefer]

For over a month I have been suggesting a new release of all GNUstep 
code components (perhaps including Gorm as well), but got no reply at 
all. Many of us have been pretty busy fixing the bugs Julian reported 
and there is still plenty to do in this area. Anyway I would like to 
start a discussion about this subject.

After the last base release we did not make a gui/back release although 
some of the changes in base wont work with an old version of gui. This 
means anybody wanting to use GNUstep with a graphical user interface 
either has to use a very old release of all components or use SVN. The 
later is especially bad for distributions as they will have to ship an 
unclear state of the code.

I will be away the first two weeks of December and would either like to 
see a release before that or after, but wont be available for last 
minute bug fixes during that period.
There are a few changes to gui/back which I would like to see done 
before the release. One is the conversion of the Ghostscript and the 
ImageMagick bitmap implementations into filter services. The other is 
the integration of the real cairo font interface (instead of the 
currently used toy fonts) as prototyped in Opal. Is there anything 
important I did forget?

It would be great if everybody could start to test its favourite 
application to find out whether any of the recent changes introduced new 
issues. What are the plans for GNUstep make and base? I think there have 
been enough changes in base that warrant a new release and gui requires 
some of these changes. For make there are a few open bug reports, maybe 
some of them could be fixed for the release?

Please remember that this will be the first GNUstep release that 
requires gcc >= 4.0. We decided so at the last base release and gui 
requires a current base version.