Release v3.4.0

[thomasp85]

Hi team @clauswilke @yutannihilation @paleolimbot @karawoo @hadley

I'm beginning to get the next release in shape. Once again this release will not be feature heavy. It will however focus on getting a lot of the internals in line as well as improving the API (with the potential of it causing some breaking changes)

I've updated to the stale 3.4.0 milestone, removing issues I don't think fit in. If any of you have something you want to work on and get into this release, please add it to the milestone so we can keep track of it

There is no release date yet but I would like to get this done at least before the end of summer

[thomasp85]

I think it could be nice to finally pull the trigger on switching to vctrs. @hadley made some experimentation for this some time ago in #4342 - do you have any recollection?

[clauswilke]

I think I can cover the two issues that are assigned to me in the 3.4.0 milestone. I should be able to do that within the next few days.

[hadley]

@thomasp85 I think the vctrs PR needs quite a lot more work to be able to tell what the downstream implications are — it's possible that it has limited impacts to the user, and could be bundled in this release, but it's also possible that it will affect a decent amount of code, and we'll need to either put it in a big release or some how make it optional.

[yutannihilation]

As the previous comment on the pull request says it would be "for the next big ggplot2 release," I too thought so.

[yutannihilation]

Can we add #3818 to the milestones? While I'm honestly not happy with the consequence of exposing both add_ggplot() and ggplot_add(), which looks confusing, I think we should merge the pull request if we decided to go in the direction. I don't see any blockers on including this in the next release.

[thomasp85]

@yutannihilation i think I have kicked the PR down the road because I ultimately don't think I want to expose it but have also failed with coming up with a concise reason for it. But I agree we should at least make a decision about it prior to this release

[yutannihilation]

Ah, okay. Since hadley agreed on the direction (#3818 (comment), and #4743 (comment)) and no one has raised objections so far, I thought it was the decision. Let's discuss there if needed.

[davidhodge931]

Any eta about when you guys are planning on releasing v3.4.0 of ggplot2? Just thinking about how supporting the linewidth thing is going to happen in my extension package

[thomasp85]

OK, we seem to be very close to starting release process. @clauswilke and @yutannihilation do you have any issues or PRs not tagged with the milestone you feel needs to get into this release?

[thomasp85]

@davidhodge931 I believe august is a fair aim for this release. I'll work on an article for extension package developers helping them transition

[clauswilke]

@thomasp85 I don't.

[yutannihilation]

Thanks, I added two.

• I'd like to include Drop non-constant aesthetics more thoroughly #4917 if possible, not because it's related to Check for dropped aesthetics #4866, but because it's a breaking change. I'm not sure if we can agree on the change, but if so, it would be a bit too long to wait for another non-patch release.
• Feat/issue 4899 simplify alignment for column geoms #4921 also looks nice to include in the release. But I think it's safe to have this in a patch release, so this is just a nice to have.

[yutannihilation]

I found #3816 could be the one that the next release is the good timing to release, but it might be a bit too late...