Although Mir 1.0 hasn’t quite shipped yet my thoughts are turning to what we do next. One of the work items that got paused was removing the mirserver dependencies from QtMir.

While Canonical isn’t using QtMir, the purpose of the affected code is still relevant. It enables custom compositing for transitions and other effects and this is of continuing, wider, interest.

Clearly Qt isn’t the only framework that might want to customize the way the server composites the scene and Mir ought to support a range of options through a stable, well thought out API.

We need to start somewhere. A few conversations over the past few days have identified a couple of options: GDK4 and Clutter.

I don’t know enough yet to prioritise or plan this work, but input from anyone interested in helping get one of these toolkits working would be great.

Mir release 0.27/MirAL release 1.4

This is an interim development release of Mir and MirAL to Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful) that delivers many of the features that were work-in-progress when we needed to restructure the project. The Mir release notes are here: https://launchpad.net/mir/0.27/0.27.0.

The MirAL 1.4 release exposes a few new features and removes support for Mir versions that are no longer supported:

• Support for passing messages to enable Drag & Drop
• Support for client requested move
• Port to the undeprecated Mir APIs
• Added “–cursor-theme” option when configuring a cursor theme
• Drop support for Mir versions before 0.26

There will be further Mir releases culminating in a Mir 1.0 release before the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful) feature freeze in August.

In previous posts I’ve alluded to the ecosystem of projects developed to support Unity8. While I have come across most of them during my time with Canonical I wouldn’t be confident of creating a complete list.

But some of the Unity8 developers (mostly Pete Woods) have been working to make it easy to identify these projects. They have been copied onto github:

https://github.com/unity8-team

This is simply a snapshot for easy reference, not the start of another fork.

We read in the press that Canonical has pulled out of the dream of “convergence”. With that the current support for a whole family of related projects dies.

That doesn’t mean that the dream has to die, but it does mean changes.

I hope the dream doesn’t die, because Canonical has done a lot of the “heavy lifting” – the foundations are laid, the walls are up, we have windows, plumbing and power. But we’re lacking the paintwork and there’s no buyer.

My expertise is developing working software and I’m going to donate some of that to the dream.

Stable Intermediate Forms is an important principle – keep things working while making changes. If you throw away a large chunk intending to replace it you’ll find re-integration really, really hard. Do things gradually!

So, don’t simply fork Unity8 and plan to get it working on Wayland. You’ll end up with a single wall that falls over before you’ve replaced the rest of the building. (Sorry, I went back to “metaphor”.)

Take the whole infrastructure etc. and keep it in place until any replacements are demonstrably ready.

The Elephant in the room

Many have issues with the way Mir has been presented to the community, but in the opinion of the developers it is a good piece of software and not inherently incompatible with Wayland. (Just look at what the developers have written about it especially the early posts that addressed this directly.)

There are two plausible evolutions of the dream that reconcile Mir with Wayland.

Plan 1: (my recommendation) Add support to libmirserver for Wayland clients in parallel to the existing protocol. Once this is working this either junk libmirclient or rework its interaction with libmirserver.

Plan 2: Implement an analog of QtMir/MirAL on your choice of Wayland server. Then transition Unity8 to these and junk Mir.

I can’t guarantee that my recommendation of “plan 1” isn’t biased by my history with the Mir project, clearly I know its potential better than that of competing projects and I would find developing these easier than someone new to the code. In then end, the choice will depend on who takes on the work and what they can achieve most effectively.

There’s a bugfix MirAL release (1.3.2) available in ‘Zesty Zapus’ (Ubuntu 17.04) and the so-called “stable phone overlay” ppa for ‘Xenial Xerus’ (Ubuntu 16.04LTS). MirAL is a project aimed at simplifying the development of Mir servers and particularly providing a stable ABI and sensible default behaviors.

The bugfixes in 1.3.2 are:

In libmiral a couple of “fails to build from source” fixes:

Fix FTBFS against Mir < 0.26 (Xenial, Yakkety)

Update to fix FTBFS against lp:mir (and clang)

In the miral-shell example, a crash fixed:

With latest zesty’s libstdc++-6-dev miral-shell will crash when trying to draw its background text. (LP: #1677550)

Some of the launch scripts have been updated to reflect a change to the way GDK chooses the graphics backend:

change the server and client launch scripts to avoid using the default Mir socket (LP: #1675794)

Update miral-xrun to match GDK changes (LP: #1675115)

In addition a misspelling of “management” has been corrected:

miral/set_window_management_policy.h

There’s a bugfix MirAL release (1.3.1) available in ‘Zesty Zapus’ (Ubuntu 17.04) and the so-called “stable phone overlay” ppa for ‘Xenial Xerus’ (Ubuntu 16.04LTS). MirAL is a project aimed at simplifying the development of Mir servers and particularly providing a stable ABI and sensible default behaviors.

Unsurprisingly, given the project’s original goal, the ABI is unchanged.

The bugfixes in 1.3.1 are:

In libmiral a focus management fix:

When a dialog is hidden ensure that the active window focus goes to the parent. (LP: #1671072)

In the miral-shell example, two crashes fixed:

If a surface is deleted before its decoration is painted miral-shell can crash, or hang on exit (LP: #1673038)

If the specified “titlebar” font doesn’t exist the server crashes (LP: #1671028)

In addition a misspelling of “management” has been corrected:

SetWindowManagmentPolicy => SetWindowManagementPolicy

There’s a new MirAL release (1.3.0) available in ‘Zesty Zapus’ (Ubuntu 17.04) and the so-called “stable phone overlay” ppa for ‘Xenial Xerus’ (Ubuntu 16.04LTS). MirAL is a project aimed at simplifying the development of Mir servers and particularly providing a stable ABI and sensible default behaviors.

Unsurprisingly, given the project’s original goal, the ABI is unchanged.

The changes in 1.3.0 fall are:

Support for “workspaces”

This is part of the enabling “workspaces” for Unity8 desktop. MirAL doesn’t provide fancy transitions and spreads, but you can see some basic workspace switching in the miral-shell example program:

$ apt install miral-examples
$ miral-app

There are four workspaces (corresponding to F1-F4) and you can switch using Meta-Alt-[F1|F2|F3|F4], or switch taking the active application to the new workspace using Meta-Ctrl-[F1|F2|F3|F4].

Support for “previous window in application”

You can now use Alt-Shift-` to switch to the previous in an application.

miral-shell adds a background

miral-shell now uses its background for a handy guide to the available keyboard shortcuts.

Bug fixes

Two bug fixes related to shutdown problems: one deals with a possible race in libmiral code, the other works around a bug in Mir.

• [libmiral] Join internal client threads before server shutdown (LP: #1668651)
• [miral-shell] Workaround for crash on exit (LP: #1667645)

There’s a new MirAL release (1.2.0) available in ‘Zesty Zapus’ (Ubuntu 17.04) and the so-called “stable phone overlay” ppa for ‘Xenial Xerus’ (Ubuntu 16.04LTS). MirAL is a project aimed at simplifying the development of Mir servers and particularly providing a stable ABI and sensible default behaviors.

Unsurprisingly, given the project’s original goal, the ABI is unchanged.

Since my last update the integration of libmiral into QtMir has progressed and libmiral has been used in the latest updates to Unity8.

The changes in 1.2.0 fall are:

A new libmirclientcpp-dev package

This is a “C++ wrapper for libmirclient” and has been split
from libmiral-dev.

Currently it comprises RAII wrappers for some Mir client library types: MirConnection, MirWindowSpec, MirWindow and MirWindowId. In addition, the WindowSpec wrapper provides named constructors and function chaining to enable code like the following:

auto const window = mir::client::WindowSpec::
    for_normal_window(connection, 50, 50, mir_pixel_format_argb_8888)
    .set_buffer_usage(mir_buffer_usage_software)
    .set_name(a_window.c_str())
    .create_window();

Refresh the “Building and Using MirAL” doc

This has been rewritten (and renamed) to reflect the presence of MirAL in the Ubuntu archives and make installation (rather than “build it yourself”) the default approach.

Bug fixes

• [libmiral] Chrome-less shell hint does not work any more (LP: #1658117)
• “$ miral-app -kiosk” fails with “Unknown command line options:
  –desktop_file_hint=miral-shell.desktop” (LP: #1660933)
• [libmiral] Fix focus and movement rules for Input Method and Satellite
  windows. (LP: #1660691)
• [libmirclientcpp-dev] WindowSpec::set_state() wrapper for mir_window_spec_set_state()
  (LP: #1661256)