General Updates

Marius: lots of bug fixing. QtWebengine works on Mir. Needs some testing. Oxide has been a struggle so we are shifting. Much simpler than expected.

A milestone is up: things that need to be fixed before release. Browser, Oxide, based on Chromium crashes, and needs to be fixed. Chromium 56 is old and broken. New browser not based on webkit but is tightly integrated.

First release of Xenial will still have Oxide and crashes but later we will release the new browser. Click should allow install of the second test browser. The new browser will support Chromium plugins but not in this first version.

Security of the browser will be current. Browser functions will remain but the engine will improve and add more. For us, upstream solutions are best wherever possible.

Questions

Will dropping armhf affect us?

Bionic has four of five years support, even if dropped now. Canonical is focusing on IoT so they are probably not going to drop 32-bit ARM.

If they do, the Nexus 5 will be 10 years old before it's fully unsupported.

Will we be updating to Unity8?

After OTA-4 (Xenial) is out, then we will work on Unity 8, Mir and Wayland etc. Not firm plans but on the list.

Suru style for Qt controls?

Release is in the Xenial package but not noticed. Merger is done, and works. Can use with flat themes etc. We need to publish some example apps to showcase these controls. QtQuickControls2 have great documentation, so it's a big advantage.

What is happening to apps already on the platform?

Good progress with core apps and OpenStore supporting both vivid and xenial. Kudos to Brian Douglass (@bhdouglass)! On the other hand, if a maintainer does not work toward xenial and there are incompatibilities, their apps will break. Some may disappear or break, inevitably. Some of apps will only need to be recompiled to work.

Telegram is now on the new store. In 99% of cases a great, quick, easy solution for 16.04 is to create app versions for vivid and xenial at the same time. Dirty hacks will be more complicated.

There is a post on the forum on how to move apps to xenial. Also linked in Telegram group and on github page.

The new version of Qt is a big improvement. Some things have broken though. GCC has also updated and that is causing difficulties. Qt is not perfectly back-compatible. Maybe a bigger problem going to Bionic but we will be better placed to deal with that in the future.

Bugs?

More testing will highlight bugs but the obvious ones have been found and solved.

End of May is the deadline for fixing the backlog. End of June is the deadline for OTA-4 xenial release.

Nexus 5 losing mobile connection was triggered by OTA 3. We don't want that kind of big problem.

Bugs are only regressions, not new issues. We can release with those still a problem.

Libertine will fail on the transition. GCC will break them. Dalton. Marius disagrees. Sees CHroot as a solution. Jan says rebuild them after the update. Containers are end of life so need to go anyway. Needs more testing !

We need testers! This is a major upgrade ! Devel images are fine for testers, not just developers. RC for xenial will be available soon. Marius assures that crashes in devel will not brick your phone or destroy your data. Reinstall without wipe and all will be fine and working. Packages may break but the phone will not break.

On Halium, what is happening with CAF?

It has been quiet because of xenial work. During testing will be a good time to resume. #blamedalton

Most developers in Halium are concentrating on their own primary projects. The Halium community is busy and a bit deflected but Halium is definitely still alive

What about Nexus 5X?

Frustrating kernel problems. Lots of guesswork and if that fails it is very annoying.

OP3 and OP5 nearly finished but no source. If Marius had been at Ubucon, would have been a big surprise but instead a live stream will happen. But XENIAL FIRST.

Why is Anbox a Mediatek thing only? Anyone tried with Halium?

It is a Qualcomm problem because they don't use Mali. Buffer frames are misaligned so the screen is either offset or off-color on Adreno GPUs. Will take a bit longer to debug. Again, not the highest priority. Platform has to be ready first.

More Notes?

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