General Updates

Roadmap! Bus syndrome, processes etc. Long discussion was had. Results not complete yet. Some input from the Forum and Telegram also helped. Within a week an announcement will be made.

Dalton posted a how to about the new browser. Has QtWebEngine. This is not as broken as the current browser on 16.04!

Marius says this will be the future browser. Much more modern. The shown version is not properly usable yet. Lots of backporting of Qt is still needed. Debian will release the parts we need and we will use theirs rather than do it ourselves.

Only installable using apt so will wipe with updates etc. This will be changed within the next week, so stay tuned.

It is Chromium with Qt base. Not Server, not Gecko (the Firefox rendering engines). A browser engine is a big project and has Qt people working on it, where Oxide was not getting any love.

The version we're currently using has Chromium 60 but will be 64 when QtWebEngine 5.11 is backported to Qt 5.9.

Marius: we are moving stuff to Docker. Makes things easy because you can use a batch of config files to change everything simultaneously. Therefore quicker and more reliable. It is multi-node, so there is redundancy. Website should therefore stay up more. We can also have regional nodes!

It will all be documented publicly. Other groups will be able to use the same system. That means we will not be distracted so much by infrastructure maintenance so we will have more time for UT. Some users have special expertise in this area so we may find some specialists to help with this.

The swarm's config can be found on ubports/ubports-docker-swarm.

Flohack on Matrix notifications.

There are different methods for different platforms. So introduce a push gateway. Seems possible if we get the library and push-helper going, we can do it. Fluffychat is an alternative Matrix client for UT. Notifications should work for that too.

We can maybe use Matrix a bit more and see how it suits us. Notifications should help.

QML in Fluffychat. Being done as an experiment. Minimalist. Combining may be better Flohack believes, given we have limited resources. Just a personal opinion. But competition is also good!

Matrix notifications are very rich. Has filters, so notifications could be tailored per device.

Looking to convert deb app packs in 16.04 to Clicks, to make things simpler for Unity8.

All core apps will have Clicks. A Node build server has been made to enable Click and debs to be built without conflicting with each other. One Jenkins file will do both. Automatic pushing to 15.04 or 16.04 requires a spread of channels. Node makes this 'easy'. Three hours was enough to do the whole thing.

All integrates with Github. Similar to build.snapcraft.io

Again, this infrastructure could be made open at some stage, to assist others.

click.ubports.com repository

T-shirts as a reward on Patreon :) Finally delivered.

We're introducing all sorts of new swag as Patreon rewards. Stay tuned in the next few days for their debut.

16.04 seems to be slowing up?

Jan says there is development done but not yet baked into the image. So closed issues are not an indication of progress. Some updates don't show because of a bug. Update from OpenStore then go back to Update Settings. That may fix it.

App developers seem a bit slow to upgrade. Dalton says regressions are being resolved, so that will help. We also need to get out and explain that updating can be done. Tents and Dotty have just been updated to Xenial.

Brian Douglass is compiling a script to move already functioning apps to the Xenial channel.

A prompt 'this might not work as expected' should be coming.

When can we get a new test version of Anbox for Pro5 ?

Marius has practical issues at the moment. Is working from laptop etc. Some help with Anbox would help! Not many people even have a Pro5.

There is no documentation for porting Anbox because has not been done.

A lot of people have been asking what does or doesn't work in 16.04 per device. How is it collated ?

Jan says that the devices page will soon contain a lot of device based detail on what works and does not.

With Xenial, we removed Canonical's old Stable Phone PPA and that messed up quite a lot of fixed stuff. When that settles we will have such details for Xenial on devices.

Could we have a beta/developer channel on OpenStore ?

There is a a feature request filed for this. Brian says that the feature is partially implemented with the new Vivid/Xenial split.

What are the biggest obstacles to releasing Xenial right now ?

The browser is the biggest problem and obstacles. Next major thing is the debs/clicks mix. OpenStore has Xenial support support, so we are on the way. Some issues with Android layer not working quite right. Plus a lot of small annoyances. Nexus 5 especially, with wireless issues.

Overlay ppa from Canonical had to be removed. That's causing some new bugs.

We started using the Critical label. Those being fixed will decide when RC happens.

What is CAF?

Code Aurora Forum. Qualcomm's fork of the Android Open Source Project, AOSP. 99% of a all Qualcomm devices run CAF. This fork of Android is just different enough in some ways to make it a huge pain for graphical applications like Mir. For this reason, we need a separate "Mir Platform" which handles the differences. That platform is not yet working.

Live porting by Marius. When ?

Not scheduled yet. Will involve some from Halium community. So the session will be wider and about new devices. Will be as vendor neutral as possible. Will help people port any device for which they have LineageOS sources for.

Anything happening with 5X?

Basically no.

More Notes?

Thanks to @stereofont for the show notes.

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