14 DAY TRIAL // A few days late, the second GNOME 3.2 beta build has arrived. Codenamed GNOME 3.1.91, the second beta continues to fix the remaining bugs and puts the finishing touches on the upcoming stable release, slated for the end of the month.
Major updates in GNOME 3.1.91 (3.2 Beta 2) include the fact that core modules depend on fewer Python bindings.
"This is 3.1.91, and it's out! It's the second beta of what will be GNOME 3.2, enjoy it while it's time, the next development release (3.1.92) will arrive in 2 weeks," the release announcement read.
"We reached an important goal in this release: GNOME core modules only depend on introspection-based python bindings (pygobject-3); this means that we do not depend on pygtk, gnome-python and gnome-python-desktop anymore," it said.
"Thanks to the a11y team for working hard porting the remaining modules," it added.
Another change is the switch to the xz archive format, which uses LZMA2 compression, for the source code tarballs.
This is of little interest to regular users, but package maintainers must take notice that GNOME intends to switch completely to xz after GNOME 3.2 is released. Currently, bz2 is supported.
The second beta, or GNOME 3.1.91, was scheduled to land on September 7, but came a few days later, during the weekend, late on September 10. However, the team has not made any changes to the official schedule for the GNOME 3.2 release.
Still, due to the delay, the next pre-release version, the RC may be coming a few days later than the scheduled September 21st.
GNOME 3.2 (3.1.9x) release schedule:
- August 31st, 2011 - GNOME 3.1.90 Beta
- September 10th, 2011 - GNOME 3.1.91 Beta 2
- Septmeber 21st, 2011 - GNOME 3.1.92 RC
- September 28th, 2011 - GNOME 3.2.0 stable release
GNOME is available for download here.