Sailfish OS update from Jolla
Autumn morning greetings from crispy and clear Tampere, Finland!
This fortnight features the usual Repository roundup and Harbour News. Thank you @dcaliste and @vige respectively. On the Energy from the Community section, there are details of the next Bremen Sailfish Community meetup that is taking place on 13th October.
Jolla C2 availability
Some of you noticed that Jolla C2 devices ran out of stock end of the last week. Since then we have secured a next batch of Jolla C2 devices and started taking back orders. Current expected delivery time is 6-8 weeks.
Community meeting recap
In the community meeting last week we had 5 topics. I’m very pleased to see so many good questions. During the meeting it was quite evident that the usual 5 minutes for a topic is too short. I’ll start extending 5 minutes topics to 10 minutes in case there’s plenty to discuss or I’m expecting that to happen. This approach would imply approximately maximum of 6 topics per meeting. Surely, we can extend a meeting from the end but that’s not feasible for all. Extra topics can always fall over to a next meeting.
One topic that might be of an interest for many is the AppSupport mobile data connection problems. Happy to say that we have a fix in internal testing – currently only for Jolla C2. The fix looks really promising and if all go as planned, we target to roll it for Jolla C2 5.0. In theory, the approach should work also for the older AppSupport versions but the fix is not yet ported to older AppSupport versions. Please also note that having 5.0 public release and internal next release open at the same adds extra for the porting.
Regarding the upcoming community meeting 9th October, I’ll encourage also new community members to join. Please welcome.
Open sourcing status
We have now open sourced Sailfish Weather app and Notes app. Even though things like Nextcloud Accounts was requested, the next app in the queue is Camera app. I’m not promising that we get it to GitHub during this week but it’s certainly close.
Compiler update journey
Many of you have been following our GCC update journey. On this fortnight we decided to give you, Sailfish Community, a bit of insight (sneak peak) how this kind of update goes.
GCC 13 - update steps (find GCC 10 here)
- Smoke test GCC 13 against branched Sailfish Core
- In this update, we had 19 broken package builds, most of which were simple to fix
- After the GCC 13 itself builds, all architecture specific packages will rebuilt itself – stage 1 completed
- Finally start runtime testing, you need to run through all sort of corner cases – daily usage is a good friend of yours. This time, we ran into a rather difficult runtime issue in Qt Quick Local Storage qml plugin which took time to debug but eventually the fix was just to change build optimization flags – stage 2 completed
- Final step is to merge the new GCC to the mainline, verify that all packages are building fine and start daily driving and fix found runtime issues – so far looking good
GCC 15 - smoke test
- We have already smoke tested GCC 15 and there we have 75 packages broken
- A lot has been fixed and most of the remaining broken packages are packaged external open source projects which only need updating but sometimes updating can cause even more updates to be needed, a spiral that we call update jenga, also some of those projects don’t have new releases yet with the needed fixes
Energy from the Community
Repository roundup
Main interface
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jolla-notes, the small text application, the repository is new, now that the code has been relicense to BSD (it was proprietary before). One can now propose code changes via pull requests. -
sailfish-browser, the browser application itself, nephros proposed not to clean the search field, so one can modify it easily in case of spelling mistake, necessary refinement in the search.
Network, communication and telephony stack
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openvpn, a VPN solution, mal proposed to update it to 2.6.15. -
messagingframework, the email Qt framework, pvuorela proposed to update to the latest upstream version, deprecating some API. -
nemo-qml-plugin-email, QML bindings for emails, pvuorela provided an upgrade for the deprecated API frommessagingframework.
Low level libraries
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libglibutil, a library extending GLib with convenient utilities, monich fixed an allocation, where the number of elements was multiplied by the size of the elements. -
wayland-protocols, Wayland protocols that adds functionality not available in the core protocol, piggz updated it to 1.41, mentioning that it is necessary for Mesa upgrade to 25.2.1. -
wayland, Wayland compositor, piggz updated it to 1.24. -
usb-moded, the USB tracking daemon, Azkali added missing build dependencies to create a Debian package. DylanVanAssche proposed to generalise the handling of file passing daemons like MTP (used to expose the internal files of the device when plugged into a computer for instance). Currently it is hardcoded tobuteo-mtp. Making the implementation generic would allow to use other MTP daemon, likeuMTPrdand go towards Android Open Accessory mode for Android Auto. He also proposed a patch not to enter rescue mode if the distribution already proposed its own rescue system. Finally he submitted another patch to implement NCM to replace RNDIS (two ways of having the device plugged by USB added to the network of the host computer). mal mentioned that the current code can already do NCM. -
openjpeg, a library for image processing with wavelets, mal updated it to 2.5.4. -
nemo-qml-plugin-contacts, QML bindings to access the contact database, lduboeuf fixed ids of configuration properties when used with Qt GSettings (as in Ubuntu touch). -
pcre2, the regular expression library, mal updated it to 10.46. -
glibc, the C library, mal backported a fix for a double free issue. He also proposed an upgrade to 2.42. -
libtiff, a library to read TIFF image files, mal updated it to version 4.7.1. -
openssl, utilities and library for cryptography, mal updated to 3.2.6. -
expat, an XML parser library, mal updated it to 2.7.3.
Developer’s corner
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cmake, the (other) build system, mal updated it to 3.31.8. -
curl, the command-line tool to access the web, mal updated it to 8.16.0. -
rpm, a software package format and tools, direc85 migrated the RPM database to use NDB since the old DBD has now been removed from recent version ofrpm. -
initrd-helpers, convenient scripts to be used to generate the kernel init ram disks, keto differentiated the error cases that could happen when trying a factory reset (image not found…). -
keto cleaned up some RPM build recipes in
voicecall,qtimageformats,fingertermand inqtxmlpatterns. -
gcc, the GNU compiler collection, mal patch for the 13 update was merged. It was long work since several packages needed to be fixed first to be able to compile with this new version. -
sudo, command line tool to gain super user priviledges, mal updated it to 1.9.17.p2.
Harbour news
Big F*#!%y Text
Big Friendly Text, or BFT for short, is an app that displays some text, fullscreen. It allows you to set the background image, font and color via UI - and the text can also be changed programmatically using Sailfish.Share, DConf or D-Bus interfaces.
SeaChest
SeaChest is an unofficial Dropbox client. The version 0.6 removed a 150MB filesize limit for file uploads. There’s also new cover action for a quick upload to main Dropbox folder. And a new icon.
There was also an issue in the package dependencies which in practise meant that new users could not start the application. That issue was fixed in the version 0.6.1.
SailPhoto
Sailphoto is an app for viewing the photos in your favorite directories. The latest version (4.0.0) contains a fix for saving the favorites.
Please feed us your news
Hope you enjoyed reading this fortnight!
This is a community update for you, Sailfish Community. Please help us out by posting your Sailfish news updates to the forum as a reply to this post. We’ll 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. Next community meeting will be on the 9th October. Please note that you can also join via Matrix bridge.
Remember to follow us also in Mastodon jolla (@jolla@techhub.social) - TechHub
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