Re: 4.0 vs 3.8 again

[Rik]

11/19/13

All,

I'm not pathologically attached to either 3.8 or 4.0.  I suggested 3.8
early on because 1) it has been almost two years (Sun Jan 15 13:02:42 2012)
since the 3.6.X series started and I don't want to keep waiting for the
code to come out, and 2) the finished GUI (stable, Ctrl+C interrupts work,
Qt instead of FLTK widgets, all platforms working) still seems a ways off. 
I think the GUI is the number one feature desired (forget JIT, even
classdef), and it was described to me that incorporating Qt plotting and
the cleanup work might take 6 months.

Right now the GUI is imperfect, for example there is an architectural flaw
which is preventing FLTK plotting on Mac OSX platforms.  This is probably
never going to be fixed, rather it will be resolved by using the Qt widget
set which we want to do anyways and which uses a different software
architecture.  So it seems appropriate to release this GUI under a 3.8
labeling with the full expectation that is is going to be superseded and
quite different in a 4.0 release.  You could do this as well with a 4.0 to
4.2 transition, but I think people will have higher expectations for a 4.0
release than they will for one which is a continuation of a series.

--Rik