This Week in Mir (19th Jan, 2018)

Mir
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Bye bye, 17.04

This week saw the end of support for 17.04 - and the unity8-desktop session: we will no longer be building Mir for this version of Ubuntu.

Hello, Fedora 27

In CI we’ve gained some build nodes and enabled Fedora 27 builds there.

Wayland Conformance Test Suite

@RAOF has continued to add tests to the Wayland Conformance Test Suite and update Mir to continue passing them.

Mir Release

In addition to Ubuntu 18.04 and the Mir Release PPA and Fedora 26, 27 and rawhide archives Mir 0.29.0 is now available as a snap: https://community.ubuntu.com/t/mir-kiosk-0-29-0-updates/3377/1

Mir Development

@alan_g has continued to progress the support for Wayland Core, which is now good enough to switch the launch utilities
to using Qt’s Wayland support by default.

This means Mir can now run Qt applications as well on Fedora as it does on Ubuntu.

This is available from the Mir Development PPA

Not yet landed, but up for review, there’s some initial work by William W Wold and @alan_g to support the Wayland extensions used by GTK based applications.

1 Like
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So if this means that Mir can work on both GTK and QT applications, what does this mean? Does it become the only server/compositor to do both GTK and QT applications? Big plus for everyone if that is the case.

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Wayland has an extension mechanism: There is a standard “wayland” protocol that every server should implement and a mechanism for adding extension protocols (that are optional).

The Qt “wayland” backend can work with the standard “wayland” protocol or, if it detects extensions it knows about, it can use those extensions.

The GDK “wayland” backend doesn’t work with servers that only support the “wayland” protocol, it also requires support for the “xdg_shell_unstable_v6” extension protocol.

There are already multiple servers that support this extension, Mir would not be unique in this.