[EPEL-devel] Mate desktop environment 1.8?

Hello and please allow a long term CentOS user to say THANK YOU! for your efforts to make available a wide variety of packages for RHEL/CentOS. I am currently running CentOS 7.3 + "X Window system" + mate-desktop-environment on several machines. Works great! However, the recent updates from CentOS-CR (continuous release repo) which brought me ALMOST to 7.4 have caused some issues in Mate 1.6.  A few buttons have gone missing (e.g. on the Shudown dialog) the text is present but the button image around the text is gone. Also some tabs and column headings are similarly missing. The text is present but the tab or column heading image is not there. The best example is in the system monitor application. Finally I have noticed that the scroll bars are missing from the mate-terminal. None of these are real show stoppers but they are somewhat cumbersome. That said, I have been doing some investigating and I found that Mate works great on fedora 26.  The main difference I see is that Fedora is running Mate 1.8 vs. 1.6 (from epel) on CentOS.  Which leads to my question... Can someone tell me when Mate 1.8 might be scheduled to be included in epel? Thanks, Ken Taylor Clayton, NC