Preparing for 4.0

The 3.33 release was suppose to be the last one before hitting 4.0, but unfortunately it is not. We will have 3.34 and maybe 3.35 to stabilize the 3.x series before it can enter maintenance mode. This still means that 4.0 is only a glimpse away.

With 4.0 a lot of things will change. The first big one is that bluez-libs and bluez-utils will be merged back into one package called bluez like it was for the 1.x series. These two packages have been released in sync since the whole 3.x series and so it only makes sense to combine them. It is then up to the package maintainers to split the library part into a libbluetooth package and so on.

The old D-Bus API will be removed. We gonna have a whole new D-Bus API set that is smaller and more powerful. It is a big step and will improve the usage of Bluetooth for end user applications a lot. In the current 3.33 release, both APIs exists in parallel to give current developers an outlook what is coming. So start using the new API.

Our embedded GLib support will be removed. The 4.x series will have a hard dependency on the GLib base library. The reason for doing it is that mainting the embedded GLib part became to much of a burden and took a lot of resources.

All future development will be done in a GIT tree on kernel.org and the CVS repositories at SourceForget.net will be marked as read-only. We will keep them for reference and potential security updates for the 3.x series.

Stay tuned. More updates on this topic will follow…