Wednesday 11 June 2014

[Devel mail] Sailfish OS update 8 on July

After some feedback Jolla is catching up in their openess in communication towards their 3rd party developers and customers.

Summer is coming fast and this is not as big update as Marc Dillon has promised to fall, using word "massive", but here's a nice pick from below: "Display each Android app in its own window in the home screen "

Soumya Bijjal, Software Project Manager at Jolla shared the following mail in a public developers mailing list:


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Hi all,

We will release another update (update8) in July before we take a break. ETA for the following update is end of August/beginning of September. Here is a quick summary of what we have planned for update8:

Changes to resource policy implementation in QtMultimedia

  • QSoundEffect will behave  nicely with resource manager and doesn't need user to do the resource  policy integration themselves. Earlier, a bug in policy enforcement has allowed QSoundEffect to function even without acquiring resources.
  • QAudioOutput will have internal resource  policy implementation. This will conflict with possible external resource policy implementation.
  • Resource-enabled objects residing in same binary will share the resource connection,  thus allowing multiple objects to play along correctly. Previously multiple resource-enabled objects would conflict with themselves (a shortcoming of resource manager implementation).

    There will be an additional mail outlining the changes in more detail.

Changes to RPM side-loading and packagekit authorization

  • “pkcon” will only work as privileged and root users (privileged = setgid privileged nemo aka “devel-su --privileged”)
  • “sdk-deploy-rpm” will be available in developer mode, and can be used to install single RPMs (right now, this does not have any confirmations, but we will add it later, so that the user knows when packages are installed, and not silently installed in the background) So if you had e.g. “pkcon install-local -y” kind of commands in your “deploy from sdk to device” scripts, you have to change that to “sdk-deploy-rpm”. If you are using the SDK (Qt Creator), it will continue working as before (the SDK has been updated to make use of the new command).
  • Third party apps should just open the RPM file with xdg-open/QDesktopServices::openUrl()/Qt.openUrlExternally(), which will give the RPM to store-client and it shows a nice GUI for installing the RPM (only when sideloading is enabled; this also works without developer mode being enabled, therefore can be used by apps submitted to Harbour too)
  • If for some reason your app really requires access to the full PackageKit API, you can use the normal polkit (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/polkit/) mechanisms to allow your app to access PackageKit (this might require installing additional polkit config files alongside your application - this doesn't work for Harbour apps, but will work for apps distributed through other means) So if you had e.g. “pkcon install-local -y” kind of commands in your “deploy from sdk to device” scripts, you have to change that to “sdk-deploy-rpm”. If you are using the SDK (Qt Creator), it will continue working as before (the SDK has been updated to make use of the new command).
Regards,
Soumya

Disclaimer:  This is an intent of the release content  and not a promise. We will do our best to keep you informed on the changes since the planning.

Source: developer mailing list
Editor note: Please read the disclaimer - part of these planned fixes/features mentioned might be pushed to later system updates or be totally changed.