Sailfish OS update from Jolla
Good morning, afternoon and evening for you all. In this fortnight we have the usual Community meeting summary, Harbour news and Repository roundup authored by @pherjung, @vige and @dcaliste respectively. Thank you for all authors.
Open sourcing Sailfish OS components proceeds but during this week we are not planning to push new components out. The next component that is planned to be published would be Gallery app (and related components). Once we have Gallery app out, we have good ingredients to improve Sailfish OS camera and photo browsing experience.
In parallel, we are analysing our internal issue tracker regarding already open sourced components and steadily moving items from internal issues tracker to public. When applicable, we try to provide guidance in the issues so that it would be easier to get started with them. Surely, you can always ask for help and guidance from us.
We could also start prioritizing openly Sailfish OS user interface / experience issues that you are seeing. For example, faster animations have been asked several times. In that area, we have various aspects that could be adjusted. One may like fast animations or one would like to have faster interaction upon long-press. This all relates to configurability ā how much you want those to be configurable and how to configure. This kind aspects need be considered. Feel free to enter your feedback regarding user interface / experience issues / improvement ideas to the comment field below.
Community meeting summary
At the last community meeting on 20 November, there were 11 members present. 5 were from Jolla and 6 were from the community. A small win for the community 
Opensourcing the Sailfish Compositor POC ā @pasik
Jolla provided some clarifications: The Sailfish-compositor and the Weston-based compositor for Sailfish are different things. It would be really useful to have a proof-of-concept or prototype of a Weston-based compositor. Further, prototyping the xdg-shell would also be useful.
Weston has been mentioned various times, but there are other possibilities, such as wlroots.
The important thing is to choose a widely used compositor without X11 dependencies to enable more toolkits.
Sailfish-Browser ESR102 status ā @pasik
At the moment, there are issues with rendering.
Open Pull Requests
Nico mentioned a PR for a different weather provider. Check it for more information.
General
In the general discussion, Nico asked how to build the weather app using SFDK. Some issues around translations prevented the app from being compiled. The solution is to comment out two lines in the spec file.
Alternatively, a dummy RPM package can be created to provide the missing translation package. This solution, offered by @nephros, has the advantage of being flexible and reusable for other Jolla projects. @Keto has this translation issue on his todo list.
Finally, the meeting was chaired from the Slush event. Everything is going well for our sailors 
Harbour news
FRAX BPM Meter
The BMP meter counter, which got aarch64 build just a few weeks ago, received another update: The plugin which is needed for decoding mp3 files is now bundled with the app.
Pokefish
Pokefish is an application for organizing your cards and decks of pokemon TCG. Hereās the changelog for the latest version (1.3.0): Rebuilt the card page. Rebuilt the add to deck page. Added information about market price for cards. Fixed adding cards to the deck. Minor fixes.
SFOS Forum Viewer
The latest version (1.14.3) added a new notification which is displayed on top of long posts which contain a poll: āThis post contains a poll. See the bottom of the post to participateā. In addition, Swedish translation was updated.
Dreamfish Now
Dreamfish Now is a new app in Jolla Store. It is a Dreamcast Now viewer - i.e. an app which allows you to see who DreamcastPi users are online right now.
Repository roundup
Main interface
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sailfish-components-accounts, a QML module to integrate accounts and single sign-on, the project was part of the last open sourcing round. -
jolla-notes, the small text application, dcaliste moved from the internal note referencing based on list positions to use a string identifier instead. This may help to add other possible backends.
Network, communication and telephony stack
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messagingframework, the email Qt framework, pvuorela moved the default data directory from old hidden directory in the home directory (~/.qmf) to a more standard location under~/.local/share/. This is only the case for newly created data directories. Indeed, email paths are hardcoded into the database and the data directory cannot simply be moved. It will require a migration to be done properly. In the meantime, pvuorela also added the new directory in the Email permissions. -
nfcd, the daemon for near field communication, monich created a small command-line executable to exchange raw data with an NFC tag. He also coded emulating ISO-DEP cards, so any arbitrarily formatted data can be exchanged. -
buteo-sync-plugin-caldav, the synchronisation framework plugin for CalDAV content, dcaliste moved the code responsible for the DAV dialog with servers into a dedicated library. Based on this library, he created a command-line tool to perform the various DAV operations for the CalDAV protocol. This tool can be a convenient way to perform from the command-line sync operations on calendar data, but it can also be used to easily debug what is going on when connecting to a server and obtaining the list of available calendars for instance.
Low level libraries
bluez5, the Linux Bluetooth stack, mal is preparing to upgrade to version 5.85.
Developerās corner
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sailfish-svg2png, a command line tool for converting SVGs to PNGs, the project has been relicensed as open source with a BSD license. Its a convenient tool to create PNGs at once for the different device resolutions that Sailfish OS is supporting. -
python3, the popular and widely used programming language, mal finished the transition to Python 3.11. He explained that moving immediately to newer versions like 3.12 would have required more work and postpone the upgrade. Indeed, from Python 3.12, setuptools is not supported anymore as a way to install Python module. It will require to update upstream modules that migrated already and to patch all modules that are still using the old setuptools. -
qtdeclarative, Qt implementation of QML language, mal removed the requirement ongdbfrom the RPM packaging specification. -
gdb, the GNU debugger, mal updated it to 16.3.
Please feed us your news
Hope you enjoyed reading this fortnight!
This is a community update, and frankly we canāt always keep up with all the exciting stuff happening in the Sailfish Community. Plus, the less of this we have to actually write ourselves the better. So please help us out by posting your Sailfish news updates to the forum as a reply to this post. Weāll collate as much of it as possible into one easily digestible post for the next update. This is your news!
Please do also join us at our community meetings on IRC, Matrix and Telegram. The next community meeting will be on the 4th December. Please note change in the time slot due to the standard time change (6:00 PM EET).
Remember to follow us also in Mastodon jolla (@jolla@techhub.social) - TechHub
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