20240813.md

Repository activities from 2024-06-26 to 2024-08-13

Repository roundup

Summer period, while calmer than the rest of the year in term of development, has been filled up with interesting changes. Next Sailfish OS version will see a modernized connman, better aligned with its upstream development. flypig, rainemak and other contributors are actively closing issues after issues for an upgrade of the browser to Gecko ESR 91. Changes to support new devices are also visible under the hood, like mal's work to adapt to Android 14, pvuorela modifications to UI for devices with cutout display, or even low-level adjustments by spiiroin to abstract device specific behaviours.

Communication bits

• messagingframework, the email Qt framework, dcaliste worked on a draft introducing a plugin mechanism to handle credential passing to e-mail protocols. It is largely based on an existing patch initially developped for Sailfish OS that requires some adjustments to be upstreamed.

• connman, the connection manager, Laakkonenjussi upgraded it to 1.38 and also fixed error handling of WireGuard VPN.

• nemo-qml-plugin-connectivity, QML bindings for network connectivity, LaakkonenJussi added support for WireGuard (a VPN solution).

• iproute, advanced IP routing and network device configuration tools, LaakkonenJussi updated it to 6.9.0.

Sailfish browser

• embedlite-components, QML components for the browser, rainemak replaced deprecated calls as required by flypig's work on upgrading the browser to ESR 91.

• sailfish-components-webview, the high-level QML components exposing a web page, rainemak added a new argument for ESR 91 to the createView() method. flypig opened a pull request to test the webview with ESR 91 and started discussing the required changes.

Multimedia framework

• qtgrilo, a framework for discovering and browsing media, Qt bindings, pvuorela fixed a crashing issue in the player application when internally the query results have entries with duplicate ids.

User interface

• yamui, minimal UI tool for displaying simple graphical indicators, spiiroin fixed a race issue on D-Bus name ownership when a second yamui instance is supposed to replace a first one.

• sailfish-office, the document application, pvuorela replaced system notifications with in-application ones to avoid issues for devices with a cutout on top of the display.

Low level libraries

• libmlocale, localisation helpers from Meego touch, mal fixed build issues with GCC 12. There were bi-directional unicode characters in the source. To avoid ambiguities, mal entered them as QChar with their hexadecimal notations.

• calligra, office suite from KDE, mal backported a code fix for an internal library used by Calligra (kcoreaddons), which was not compiling anymore with GCC 11.

• cups, the standards-based printing system, mal has upgraded it to 2.4.10.

• openssh, the OpenSSH implementation of SSH protocol, mal updated it to 9.8p1.

• nemo-qml-plugin-filemanager, QML components to create a file manager, abranson updated the paths used by AppSupport when calculating its disk usage: /home/.android will become /home/.appsupport and the runtime will be in /opt/appsupport instead of /opt/alien.

• libdrm, a Direct Rendering Manager runtime library, mal updated it to 2.4.122.

• mesa, graphic libraries, mal updated them to 24.1.3.

• libmnl, minimalistic Netlink user-space library, LaakkonenJussi cleaned up the spec file used to build the RPM packages.

• libjpeg-turbo, a fast encoding and decoding library for JPEG, mal updated it to 3.0.3.

• droidmedia, Android media wrapper library, mal proposed a patch to support Android 14 APIs.

• poppler, the PDF (rendering) library, attah's work on upgrading to the latest upstream version 24.08.0 has been merged.

• ssu, the seamless software updater, Thaodan fixed build with recent libzypp.

• libresource, the MeeGo resource management library, sertonix fixed build issues with GCC 14.

• mce, mode control entity, sertonix added missing includes reported by GCC 14 as errors. spiiroin proposed a different fix later on and also ensured that POSIX version of basename() is working, for OS shipping non GNU libc, like MUSL libc. spiiroin also added support to use numerical values (instead of named values) in evdev mapping.

• buteo-syncfw, the framework handling synchronisation, dcaliste expanded the QML support, adding a SyncManager object that can talk to the synchronisation daemon. The idea is to provide necessary functions to UBPorts so they can simplify their own declarative plugin.

• qmf-notifications-plugin, a plugin to send notifications on email changes, pvuorela cleaned up various parts of the code. dcaliste dropped the inclusion of a header coming a patch to messagingframework to use direct calls to libaccount-qt5.

Developer's corner

• autoconf, the infamous GNU build system - automatic system detection, mal upgraded it to 2.72 (from 2.71).

• make, a tool to simplify builds, mal has been working on an update to version 4.4.1. Upgrading make requires though to adjust some other projects:

• farstream,

• sdk-harbour-rpmvalidator, the harbour validation scripts, vige replaced deprecated egrep with grep -E.

• util-linux, a collection of basic system utilities, mal added missing symlinks on swap tools, as required by systemd.

• android-tools, the Android tools, Thaodan changed the packaging of the Android tools, for it to be based on the NDK tools, as it is already done by some other distributions.

• android-tools-hadk, the Android tools for the hardware development kit, now that android-tools is based on NDK tools, Thaodan removed them from the HADK packaging. He also ensured in mer-android-chroot script that all mount points are unmounted on exit.