20220902.md

Repository activities from 2022-08-19 to 2022-09-02

Besides the good news about newly added APIs to Jolla harbour, one can see in this digest many updates of low-level packages to their latest upstream releases, with a large part of the work coming from mlehtima but also from community members like attah. Besides bringing the possibility to use latest capabilities, it also ensures to get all latest bug corrections from this free software world and keep the platform up to date. I'll just quote nico from latest community meeting to conclude this introduction : "Sooooo, Sailfish 6 will have Qt6, right?"… ;-)

Homescreen

• lipstick, the compositor and main user interface of your phone, Tomin1's pull request about supporting an X-DBusActivatable key in desktop files, has been merged. JacekJagosz's proposition to allow Discord notifications (from the Discord Android app) has also been merged. pvuorela mentioned that from Sailfish OS release after 4.4 and Android newer than version 4, this kind of modification per application should not be necessary anymore.

Browser stack

• gecko-dev, the browser engine, rainemak got merged his pull request to remove specific Sailfish OS skining of buttons, inputs or textareas, as suggested by minman on this forum.

• qtmozembed, Qt bindings for the Gecko engine, rainemak fixes a regression introduced earlier when adapting the bindings for HiDPI displays. In his message, Rainemak is mentioning apz.touch_start_tolerance being 0.0762785. In relation to this forum message, where d.geelen is suggesting to raise this parameter to 0.5, I'm still wondering if this will actually fix the problem of tap with the browser, or if it's not related to.

• embedlite-components, QML components for the browser, rainemak is proposing to fix some Javascript errors related to selection.

• sailfish-browser, the browser application itself, rainemak added a way to copy the current URL to clip board by long press on the toolbar. He also added a modification to the application to ignore PIPE signals. This may mitigate crash of a tab.

Audio / video stack

• mlehtima is proposing to drop the Autotools in favour of Meson as a build system for various Sailfish OS specific packages related to Pulse Audio. This moves is following the upstream one, dropping the Autotools support from version 15.0:

• in pulseaudio-module-keepalive,
• in pulseaudio-modules-nemo,
• in pulseaudio-policy-enforcement.

• gstreamer, a multimedia framework, mlehtima is working in branch on the upgrade to latest upstream version 1.20.3 (from version 1.18.5).

• ffmpeg, a framework to encode and decode multimedia resources, mlehtima is proposing to upgrade to upstream version 5.1.0 (from older 4.4.1).

• thumbnaild, the daemon generating image and video thumbnails, mlehtima reworked the libav code to adapt to API changes introduced by ffmpeg 5.0.

• sdl, a multimedia library, mlehtima upgraded to the latest upstream version 2.24.0 (from the older 2.0.18). He also upgraded add-on libraries in the process, with libsdl-mixer and libsdl-image moving to 2.6.2, libsdl-net to 2.2.0, libsdl-sound to 2.0.1 and libsdl-ttf to 2.20.1.

• mlehtima is working on updating many low-level libraries to their latest upstream versions:

• speex and speexdsp, a library handling a free codec for speech,
• libvpx, a VP8/VP9 video codec library,
• libogg, an efficient music compression library,
• libwebp, a library for encoding and decoding image in WebP format,
• libsndfile, a library for reading and writing sound files,
• flac, the loss-less audio codec,
• sbc, a library for bluetooth low-complexity, subband codec,
• mpg123, MPEG audio player and decoder library,
• openjpeg, a library for image processing with wavelets,
• libjpeg-turbo, a fast encoding and decoding library for JPEG.

Document stack

• tracker, desktop-neutral metadata database and search tool, mlehtima is proposing to upgrade to 3.3.3, it was previously 3.2.1.

• tracker-miners, metadata extractors for tracker, mlehtima is proposing to upgrade to 3.3.1.

• poppler, the PDF (rendering) library, attah is proposing to upgrade to the latest upstream version 22.08.0. This requires some changes on a lower-level library though.

• libjpeg-turbo, a fast encoding and decoding library for JPEG, attah modified the build configuration to allow the more modern feature of source/destination managers working in-memory beside the older way of using FILE*. This is an ABI break, but necessary to move forward with other repository like poppler.

OS low-levels

• mce, mode control entity, for monitoring and handling various global modes and states, karry worked on a pull request to move from cgroup to PSI (pressure stall information) to get memory consumption of user processes. Thaodan commented on the good work and mentioned that it should work for devices with newer kernel than 4.4. From Karry experiments, this new metric will improve Sailfish OS memory management.

• libglibutil, a library extending GLib with convenient utilities, slava committed a fix for a memory leak in unit tests.

• libsignon, a framework to centralise signing credentials and procedures, tomin1 added a patch to increase the size of the token in the database, since some accounts are now using token larger than 4kB.

Documentation

• qtlocation, Qt modules to handle positioning and location, vigejolla's pull request enabling packaging of the documentation was merge. It's a part of the documentation task required to open more APIs in Jolla harbour.

• nemo-qml-plugin-contacts, QML bindings to access the contact database, vigejolla added a minimal documentation skeleton for the QML plugin and also package it. It's a part of the documentation task required to open more APIs in Jolla harbour.

• nfcd, the daemon for near field communication, slava completed the documentation of the DBus interface regarding the GetAll() method and its poll_parameters return values.

• docs.sailfishos.org, the documentation website sources, many changes already visible have been pushed so far:

• rainemak added command line tips to allow (or remove) the weather application from partner space.
• vigejolla cleaned the API page to point to the harbour page of the documentation instead of the raw source code files.
• vigejolla updated the page on allowed API in harbour to match the 4.4 version.
• Tomin1 updated the documentation on the desktop file entry X-DBusActivatable.
• jovirkku added a page on supported devices.

OS build

• initrd-helpers, convenient scripts to be used to generate the kernel init ram disks, notkit contributed a modification of the script detecting the internal device used to store the OS, for some few devices where the kernel is indexing with a '1' the internal storage (usual index is '0').

• mic, an image creator for Linux distributions, martyone added a script to generate changelog from git when building with the SDK. This is algning the SDK behaviour with the OBS one.

• scratchbox2, the cross-compilation tool used by the SDK, martyone got two pull requests merged in, one is about fixing the code choosing if a program should be run under tooling or target environment. And the other one is about fixing builds when -t / is passed.

SDK

• sailfish-qtcreator, the Qt IDE, deepbluev7 is patching a compile script to fix an issue with an argument string being passed as a translation unit.

• sdk-harbour-rpmvalidator, the harbour validation scripts, vigejolla, in additon to the last fortnight changes to the allowed elements in Jolla harbour, has added more APIs:

• for contacts (QML components and low-level handling),
• for telephony, with its QML components,
• for accounts, with its QML components,
• for Bluetooth access, with its QML components.
• and a warning about the fact that these newly allowed QML components may not be as stable as harbour rules used to ensure.

Software engineering

• hw-ramdisk, tools to be used to create init ramdisk for booting Sailfish OS, the pull request to obtain ramdisk independant of the moment they were created from martyone was accepted.

• sp-stress, tools for creating stress test loads, the proposition from martyone to remove volatile information (like date and time) of the run, so stress logs can be checked over reference ones without spurious false positive results, has been merged.

• python3, the popular and widely used programming language, Tomin1's pull request to update the python3 package with a patch from Fedora so that rpmbuild uses a timestamp from the changelog, has been merged.

• meego-rpm-config, specific rpm configuration files for Sailfish OS, direc85 has cherry-picked a patch to strip more than 256 symbols from packaged binaries and libraries. This would help building Whisperfish, as discussed in this forum thread.

• libphonenumber, a library for manipulating international phone numbers, martyone is working on a patch to ensure build reproducibility by sorting sources during build.

• build-compare, scripts to find out if the build result differs to a former build, martyone has merged the upgrade of the package to upstream version from 2022-06-20 and then from 2022-08-23.

• libjpeg-turbo, a fast encoding and decoding library for JPEG, martyone modified the BUILD variable to remove any trailing elements after the '+' in the version to get reproducable builds on OBS.