Community meeting on IRC 14th September 2023

Announcements
#2
  • Name/IRC nick: Adam Pigg (piggz)
  • Topic:
    SailfishOS Edition of the Pinephone Pro
  • Some details about the topic:
    I have been approached by Pine64, who would like to make available an edition of the PinephonePro pre-loaded with my SailfishOS port on the Pine store.
    I am more than happy for this to happen (with some caveats) and would like to know if Jolla would be against this in any particularly strong way.
    There is precedence for something like this, the “Jolla Devices” store sells sony xperias pre-loaded with the free editions of SailfishOS, and I would of-course not be shipping any of the components that typically require the SailfishX license.
    I see this good PR and advertising for Jolla and it will only make Sailfish more known.

(the caveats are that i feel the Pro version of the sailfish os port is not as stable/usable as for the regular pinephone just yet, so i would like this to be made clear so as to not disappoint users, and hopefully it would bring in more developers)
​
It would be greatly appreciated if you could reach out to me before the meeting, so that the details can be worked out with Pine. If you have any conditions, then I would of-course be more than happy to do my best. (for example, DanctNix which is based on arch, does not use the name Arch so to be less associated with that project, would you want to not use the Sailfish name?)

  • Approx. time needed: 10 minutes
  • Substitute (optional): Note, i typically find it difficult to attend the community meetings these days, but feel free to discuss and I will read up later
19 Likes
#3

Untracked Bug reports

Was the last one resolved?Community meeting on IRC 17th August 2023 - #2 by pherjung

2 Likes
#4

I need to check again, but none of the last provided list has been resolved.

#5

@rainemak should we just use the last list again, or do you want both?

#6

Is there any chance to ever get this one tracked, PLEASE?

5 Likes
#7

Added tracker for the missed call LED.

4 Likes
#8

I think that’s correct. We’ll check the last list first (if time permits then we’ll check both). So for @thigg, let’s just use the last again for now. Thank you both!

#9
  • name: thigg
  • topic: regarding keyboard input issues in android apps ([AlienDalvik / AAS] Typing characters after deleting typed text often inserts the deleted string)
  • details: there are two issues with keyboard input in some android apps. One is that deleted text appears again and the other that after placing the cursor added text sometimes is inserted at the previous location. It looks like the issue is around for quite a while and I’d like to help to find the cause. Can you describe how the input is actually passed and if we have a chance from the community side to investigate into this?
  • apprx time needed: 6min
  • substitute: if i can’t make it, please discuss without me
2 Likes
#10
8 Likes
#11

These are all Gecko ESR 91 related. These aren’t stuck, I’m just raising them in case there’s any need to discuss them.

ICU 70.1 (thanks for looking at this already)

GCC backported patch (special thanks to @direct85 for this)

cbindgen 0.19.0 (thanks for all the useful feedback on this as well)

5 Likes
#12

Just a quick note about bug 11 - its title has been changed to [4.5.0.19] Forwarding email can insert extra \r\n in header data as the headers are in place, but possibly just formatted wrong.

#13

Nope, I am not interested in participating at Jolla’s “IRC community meetings” at all:

  • Jolla clearly stated that this forum (FSO) is the location to discuss issues, bugs, etc. It was their reasoning that hence they switched off most issue trackers of their source code repositories at GitHub and formerly at Jolla’s own GitLab instance (which is not reasonable IMO, because filing an issue for a specific component by a developer is vastly different from the character of issue reports in this forum).
  • These “IRC community meetings” appear to be a measure to create just another hurdle (i.e., gate) by enforcing synchronous communication at an inappropriate time for most, by requiring to be willing and able to “speed-type”, etc., so Jolla can and already did easily claim, “this was not presented at a ‘community meeting’” rsp. “this must be presented at a ‘community meeting’” for issues well documented in this forum or at GitHub, and then ignore them.
  • Looking at Jolla’s usual responses at “IRC community meetings”, the whole process is a waste of effort and time: “We will look into it” to be never mentioned again, “We cannot answer this”, “We may consider this” to be never mentioned again, “Currently we have no plan to address this” are the regular “answers”.

As stated in the issue thread, this issue is at least 7 years old, was reported multiple times at TJC, has been silently addressed by Jolla at least once (which alleviated it a bit, but never really resolved it), while never acknowledging it.

Jolla’s policy always was and still is to be absolutely closed up and to stay mum (contentually, for both technical as well as business aspects), plus I see no indication for this to change. If Jolla would, e.g., allow read access to their internal bug tracker, or report openly that they recently have been becoming bankrupt (or close to that) another time and how this was resolved, then I will believe that Jolla is trying to do better; until then all these efforts are more or less futile.

P.S.: In the light of Jolla’s recurring economic (close) failures, I also expect Jolla to commit themselves legally binding and publicly to release all proprietary components which comprise SailfishOS (i.e., all but Alien Dalvik aka “AAS”: Silica, Lipstick, etc.), in order to enable the community to continue development of SailfishOS, in case Jolla ultimately fails economically; until then it makes more sense for community developers to spend efforts and time on FLOSS software which runs independently of SailfishOS, because such work is implicitly sustainable.

5 Likes
#14

I mostly agree; there are a lot of questions which have not been returned to although they are quite old. It would be nice to have some kind of recap of the queued questions. GPS, X10III battery consumption and echo cancellation issues come to mind first. Some/many of the issues are to be fixed by Sony (unfortunately) and as long as Jolla doesn’t update the supported firmware (which is a massive undertaking), these will not change… If that’s the case, it would be fair to just state that, instead of leaving the community with assumptions and read-between-the-lines. It’s frustrating to everyone.

The issue linked (issues with Android text input) is indeed several years old. I guess because it works on WhatsApp and some other apps, it’s good enough for the paid partners, because it’s not fixed after all this time. Fennec (Firefox) is one that hits me the most - some sites just don’t work with Jolla Browser, so I’m forced to use something else. I have to work around it on daily basis. I don’t even think about it any more, I do the same tricks with Jolla Browser too…!

I’d love to participate to the IRC meetings, but for the second company in a row there’s a mandatory meeting for me on every other Thursday at 10 o’clock, and I can’t expect either company to change their schedule. What are the odds…

5 Likes
#15
  • Name/IRC nick: direc85 (unable to participate)
  • Topic: Stabilizing TextArea.focusOutBehavior
  • Some details about the topic: Jolla Messages keeps the keyboard open after the message has been sent, so sending the next message is easier. Whisperfish, a Signal client, would have benefited from the same behaviour from the start, but we couldn’t figure out how it was done. Eventually I stumbled upon the solution while looking for something else – see Whisperfish issue 489 – it turned out to be the TextArea.focusOutBehavior, which is an undocumented property, inherited from the private side. Could Jolla stabilize the property and document it so other applications could easier replicate the same behaviour?
  • Approx. time needed: 5 min
  • Substitute (optional): No substitute at this time. The question is quite precise, so an answer will do just nicely.
3 Likes
#16
  • Name/IRC nick: direc85 (unable to participate)
  • Topic: Improving Silica documentation
  • Some details about the topic: There are typos, mistakes and simply wrong information in the Silica documentation. Example: By documentation, PageStack.push() takes var page, PageStack.replace() takes int page and PageStack.nextPage() takes Page page – by experiments I can tell they all take Page type variable. I mentioned about this in the #sailfishos channel some months ago, but it was not reacted to, even there was now active conversation after that for some time (if my memory serves me right). Another example of vast amount of missing data is list of inherited methods and properties. As Qt documentation website defaults to Qt 6, manually jumping to version Qt 5.6 needs to be done often, so having even the Qt part of the list would be most helpful. Could the current documentation be opened to pull requests so community could contribute to it? If not, what is the preferred way for the community to contribute?
  • Approx. time needed: 10 min
  • Substitute (optional): No substitute, but I wish for a lively conversation around the issue from all participants.
4 Likes
#17

Minutes: #sailfishos-meeting: Sailfish OS, open source, collaboration -- 14th Sep 2023
Minutes (text): https://irclogs.sailfishos.org/meetings/sailfishos-meeting/2023/sailfishos-meeting.2023-09-14-07.00.txt
Log: #sailfishos-meeting log

5 Likes
#18

Thank you for the responses and discussion, the log was an interesting read!

About the PR: I agree with @flypig that it makes no sense to merge it before it has been tested. Thank you for all participants already in the process, things have moved a lot faster than what I expected, to be honest!

About the build: I’m getting more familiar with Platform SDK, and I’m at the point that I’m quite confident the missing packages are preventing my builds - I’ll list the missing deps later today. Thanks for @flypig, @rainemak and @mal for help, I wouldn’t have gotten this far alone!

About the docs: Thank you for the lively discussion, all the suggestions and clarifying the PageStack usage! As a developer who writes docblocks too, I understand the trouble and work of improving such documentation. (Let’s just say there are pros and cons…) One motivation to this was simply having more eyes on the documentation with some known method would help the quality and completeness of the docs - that would benefit everyone. At this point I second the dedicated forum section, since separating the documentation can be quite a large task. That way we could at least gather related information in one place, which is a great step forward already!

About Gecko: I could try to replicate the build and the GCC bug, and then see if the OBS packages are any good. I don’t mind messing around in my Platform SDK setup, since it’s there because of the GCC bug in the first place!

I’m also a bit hyped about the PinePhone discussion, and happy to hear xulrunner build was also fixed!

It’s great to see so much going on after the quiet summer! Welcome back everyone!

8 Likes
#19

Thanks for the answer. I hope the forum thread helps you with investigation and it makes it easier to fix

1 Like
#20

Created own category for Documentation issues

5 Likes
#21

I wrote the (incomplete for sure but well close enough) journey of running into the missing packages on the dedicated thread and that’s as far as I can go with current knowledge :slight_smile: