GNOME 3.12 Development Packages Start Coming

With the first GNOME 3.12 development release (v3.11.1) due to occur this week, many of the first very early GNOME 3.12 packages are being checked in for early testing ahead of the desktop's full debut in March of 2014.

The latest GNOME package releases can be found via this month's gnome-announce-list archive. For the GNOME 3.11.1 packages available at the time of writing, there isn't anything too groundbreaking but some of the work includes:

- WebKitGTK+ 2.3.1 adds the WebKit2 API for TLS errors, respects image orientation by default, support for blob URLs to the GStreamer media back-end, support for sub-titles, and other development changes.

- GNOME Logs, one of the newest GNOME applications that is a log viewer for the systemd journal, has a fair amount of work. GNOME Logs 3.11.1 now supports case-insensitive searching, user-interface changes, new translations, and much more.

- PyGObject 3.11.1 has been released and takes care of lots of memory leaks, among other fixes.

- The Cheese 3.11.1 web-cam software has some API work, a new CheeseAvatarWidget, and user-interface alterations.

- AT-SPI 2.11.1 and ATK 2.11.1 were also released ahead of this first GNOME 3.12 development snapshot and their changes mostly just come down to bug-fixes.

Expect the GNOME 3.12 package changes to be much more exciting in the weeks and months ahead, given that GNOME 3.10 was only released last month. The ongoing Wayland enablement should be particularly exciting during the GNOME 3.12 cycle among other work to be covered on Phoronix.

The official GNOME 3.12.0 release is scheduled to happen on 26 March 2014 but until then will be the frequent GNOME 3.11 development releases.