Ubuntu Touch Q&A 24
Scopes, Stats, Store and More!

 
 

Looking for the Audio-only version of the Community Update?

You're just one big orange button away -->

Show Notes

Forum link

Participating: Dalton, Florian, Marius

Last (two) weeks work (00:50)

  • Florian: currently in Spain, not much time due to work, only little adjustments
  • Marius: Working on Unity8 for Bionic, and on Mir (display server)
    • Some more work for Xenial, some bugs were squashed.
    • Most applications are now working, except OpenStore
  • Florian: MTP is now working on OnePlus One, credits to Chakare. This was a simple permission issues, fix will only come with the OTA for Xenial.
  • Dalton: Porting Nexus 5X, lot of weird issues
    • Port on hold for now due to huge time required
  • Dalton: update on Halium development (issue #404)
    • (no info about the contents, just talking about getting issues with http status codes as IDs)

Florian makes an anouncement: (32:38)

  • Telegram will change the API and transport protocol. The good news is that Telegram is now publishing libraries that will help re-implement everything.

Questions:

What's the status on founding the Foundation? (10:12)

  • Waiting for the German government to confirm all the bureaucracy
  • Florian: On the good side they haven't made any questions so far, and this can mean that everything is going well

Are there plans to support printers? (12:14)

  • Several problems: power, ..., and printers are awful. Canonical already worked on it. Printing subsystem should come with 16.04. Help (testing, translation) is appreciated
  • Github UBports "print"

Translations (15:33)

  • Translations tend to not be as recent (from Weblate) as intended. Nothing is lost, just waiting for synchronization.
  • 16:04 will bring some new strings to be translated with it

On the old website Oneplus 3 won the vote for the next device to be ported, what does this mean? (17:04)

  • There's no guarantee there will be an official port, but Marius already has a community port for it.

Ubuntu Personal was the plan from Canonical. Ubuntu with snaps everywhere. What happened to it? (20:08)

  • It died. Having a really hard time making mir work with snaps, and for this to work we would have to be able to snap everything. This is an unlikely scenario, so this will not happen. But it's likely there will be snap support.

Update on scopes? (since ~2-3~ 8 episodes earlier) (21:25)

  • Scopes regarded pretty much dead
  • Current plan: implementing a dash-like interface for mobile, on desktop something like icons on the desktop. Choice is with the community
  • Feedback from earlier scope developers: not great
  • Scopes would still need a lot of work

Will Google project Treble will help with Halium? (25:39)

  • Marius says: YES!!!!! Very happy with it. No more Qualcomm specific changes. This will help a lot with the ports. But we need to get to the point where we support Trebles and this will be problematic. We can get there on a reasonable amount of time. However the priority is Xenial.

What's going on with uMatriks Marius!? (28:48)

Where are my audio and video calls, and where are my push notifications?

  • Push notifications were an experiment. Marius says he will get back to it after Xenial

Stats? (35:07)

  • This will be worked on later
  • We want to guarantee anonymous submission, data will be made public, and this will be made opt-in
  • UBports will not follow the same path Canonical decided to follow. We only need what devices are being used to focus the development and have bug and crash reports
  • GH ubports/ubuntu-touch #402

Will there be X86 clicks and x86 OpenStrore? (39:41)

  • At this point developers can generate clicks for X86. We don't know the status for this on the Open Store
  • Huge thanks to the OpenStore Team!
    • There was also some discussion about the new policies, which is mostly due to the hosting making the maintaining people responsible for content.

Will we work on Bionic? (45:53)

  • There are multiple technical reasons for not focusing yet on Bionic, and we also need to support the legacy devices. We need more time to be able to do all the work necessary to go for Bionic. There will be no sprint for Bionic, we will walk to Bionic.

"If you walk up the stairs you actually get up, if you run up the stairs you have a big chance of falling down, if you jump up the stairs you can't get up and you have fallen."

— Marius Gripsgard, 03. March 2018

  • We are not talking about Android Bionic, but the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver
    • When we mean Android Bionic, we'll just say Android Bionic
    • ...or we'll just always say 18.04 when we mean the Ubuntu release

Will there be Unity8 for Debian? (51:35)

  • Marius says: Yes... But shhh this is a secret...
  • Shout-out to Simon Quigley for creating the UBports packaging team

How usable is Xenial if I want to work hard on Gemini PDA port? (54:22)

  • It's upstream Linux driversIt's not. But Marius will apparently immediately buy and port any mobile device running a mainline Linux kernel

What about nextcloud/carddav contact sync? (57:14)

  • It would be nice! Who can develop this? We would like to have it. We're looking at it, probably is coming eventually

Q&As now transcribed live by community (1:01:48)

  • Available as soon as immediately after end of stream at ubam/community/transcripts/qna
  • Translations are welcome, see the Transcript Guidelines there
  • New transcriptors welcome, though with >8 total chaos, so kept closed. Ask UBAM whether help is needed
Clickable for Atom
A developer's Best Friend