Stable releases on github?

[rubyFeedback]

Hey there roxterm devs,

Would it be possible to add stable releases on github?

At URL like:

https://github.com/realh/roxterm/issues/releases/

It is not a big deal to use git and fetch it, or create a .zip file,
but the reason I prefer stable releases is kind of convenience
(I just "wget REMOTE_URL_HERE") as well as a focus on
stability for the most part (upstream devs tend to be more
critical when releasing stable software, from my experience).

Either way please feel free to ignore this issue request and
close it for any reason - it is just meant as feedback/question.

[realh]

Roxterm is in maintenance mode at the moment; there's no point in doing a major overhaul until vte has a stable version based on GTK4. You can consider any numerical tag to be a stable release. There is even a "stable" tag, but it's probably bad practice for me to keep moving it, and I should make it a branch instead.

[TLMcNulty]

there's no point in doing a major overhaul until vte has a stable version based on GTK4.

The vte issue tracker shows most of the GTK4 work completed, and I can find libvte-2.91-gtk-dev in debian package repos.
https://packages.debian.org/sid/libdevel/libvte-2.91-gtk4-dev

Additionally, looks like there are confs for building VTE with GTK4; ref 1: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71991163/can-we-use-libvte-terminal-widget-on-gtk4-window

Prior to running the meson and ninja build commands as noted in the installation steps, I revised the "meson_options.txt" file to enable the building of "GTK4" support for the "vte" libraries, changing the "value" attribute from "false" to "true".

option(
    'gtk4',
    type: 'boolean',
    value: true,
    description: 'Enable GTK+ 4.0 widget',
)

I've been experimenting with adding these to my system but I haven't gotten an as-is compilation working yet, always takes a bit of futzing with deps and links. Once I go get all the way through though I'll step back through with the deprecation/diagnostic warnings and see if I can contribute anything.

https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/migrating-3to4.html

@realh think we can drum up enough momentum to roll this over? Let me know if my position on any of the above has missed the mark.

[realh]

I did vaguely notice that there's a vte4 package in Arch now, but I'm busy writing a mobile app at the moment, so I don't have time to do any major work on roxterm. I'd want to do more than a simple port to GTK4. A lot of the code is very outdated, because it started life in the GTK2 era. Other things that should/could be done:

• Use GtkApplication (I think GTK4 makes it hard not to anyway).
• GtkApplication will make it practical to remove the direct dependency on dbus.
• Make more use of GObject, mapping profile options to properties.
• Neovim integration, with roxterm managing vim tabs.
• A plugin system would be handy, so that people who don't use vim can get rid of the extra menu options etc.
• The plugins could me made flexible enough to do stuff like add a file explorer like in an IDE or GUI alterntaive to vim's nerdtree.
• Maybe scrap most of the config UI; users can edit the config with a text editor instead, with menu items to open the relevant files (in neovim or $EDITOR), and FAM so roxterm knows when to load the changes. The glade/XML file for the current UI is horrible, with baggage going back to GTK2.