Next MATE Release
MATE 1.18 has been released in March 2017 and upstream developers are still providing patches to the latest release to fix some issues found after the release. While doing so, they also started the work toward next MATE release 1.20 (or whatever the new version will be).
They have released several 1.19 tarballs as a snapshot release for testing and so far, most of their works are removing deprecated functions found in older GTK+3 releases. Their plan was to upgrade the minimum requirement of GTK+3 for next MATE release. It's quite tiring to support 5 different GTK+3 versions (3.14, 3.16, 3.18, 3.20, and 3.22) since every major GTK+3 brings regressions toward themes. They are planning to support only 3.20 or 3.22 as modern distributions are moving forward as well. Slackware-current already uses 3.22, so there won't be any problem at all.
This brings some consequences for Slackware users as Slackware do not update GTK+3 in stable releases, meaning that MATE 1.18 will be the last version of MATE that can be installed for 14.2 (if they do bump the requirement)
I have been working on MATE 1.19 for some time and i prepared a different branch (1.19-dev) for it, while waiting to be merged in master branch someday (when all tarballs have been released). The only big difference is the new package added, which is graphviz as a new requirement for new vala 0.38.0.
Please note that once all MATE 1.19 tarballs have been generated, 1.19-dev branch will be merged into master and it will be supported for -current users only. Stable users should keep following 14.2-mate-1.18 branch for future updates.
They have released several 1.19 tarballs as a snapshot release for testing and so far, most of their works are removing deprecated functions found in older GTK+3 releases. Their plan was to upgrade the minimum requirement of GTK+3 for next MATE release. It's quite tiring to support 5 different GTK+3 versions (3.14, 3.16, 3.18, 3.20, and 3.22) since every major GTK+3 brings regressions toward themes. They are planning to support only 3.20 or 3.22 as modern distributions are moving forward as well. Slackware-current already uses 3.22, so there won't be any problem at all.
This brings some consequences for Slackware users as Slackware do not update GTK+3 in stable releases, meaning that MATE 1.18 will be the last version of MATE that can be installed for 14.2 (if they do bump the requirement)
I have been working on MATE 1.19 for some time and i prepared a different branch (1.19-dev) for it, while waiting to be merged in master branch someday (when all tarballs have been released). The only big difference is the new package added, which is graphviz as a new requirement for new vala 0.38.0.
Please note that once all MATE 1.19 tarballs have been generated, 1.19-dev branch will be merged into master and it will be supported for -current users only. Stable users should keep following 14.2-mate-1.18 branch for future updates.