Welcome to The Roundup #8, your bytes of Solus news. In this roundup, we’re talking about the multitude of stack upgrades that have been performed in the last week, as well as upcoming upgrades.

You All Get A Stack Upgrade

Since last week’s The Roundup, we’ve performed a multitude of stack upgrades and made preparations for upcoming ones.

KDE Frameworks 5

KDE Frameworks 5 has been updated to 5.49.0. A variety of improvements and fixes include:

• Breeze Icons: Add drive-optical icon
• KTextEditor
  • Proper fix for the raw string indenting auto-quoting
  • Fix indenter to cope with new syntax file in syntaxhighlighting framework
  • Show “Search wrapped” message in center of view for better visibility
• KTextWidgets
  • KFindDialog: give the lineedit focus when showing a reused dialog
• Plasma Framework
  • If an applet is invalid, it has immediately UiReadyConstraint
  • Fix fading node when one textured is atlassed
• Syntax Highlighting
  • CoffeeScript: fix templates in embedded JavaScript code & add escapes
  • CoffeeScript & JavaScript: fix member objects. Add .ts extension in JS
  • Use in-class member initialization where possible
  • Add Definition::::formats()
  • Add QVector Definition::includedDefinitions() const
  • Add Theme::TextStyle Format::textStyle() const;
  • Python: fix escapes in quoted-comments

For the full announcement where the above mentioned items have been sourced, click here.

Mesa

Mesa was updated early in the week to 18.1.5 and subsequently to 18.1.6. Both releases are bug fix releases on the 18.1 series and features changes such as:

• egl: Fix missing clamping in eglSetDamageRegionKHR
• egl: Fix leak of X11 pixmaps backing pbuffers in DRI3.
• i965: Sweep NIR after linking phase to free held memory
• r600: enable tess_input_info for TES
• radv: Disable disabled color buffers in rbplus opts.
• radv: emit a dummy ZPASS_DONE to prevent GPU hangs on GFX9
• radv: fix a memleak for merged shaders on GFX9
• radv: Fix number of samples used for binning.
• radv: make sure to wait for CP DMA when needed
• radv: Select correct entries for binning.

dbus

dbus has been updated from the 1.10 legacy to the 1.12 stable series. By and large, this is an “under-the-hood” change that most users will neither notice nor be affected by, however it does introduce a variety of new APIs and configuration options that developers may find useful.

gstreamer

gstreamer has been updated to 1.14.2, which is a bug fix release on top of the 1.14 series. A variety of fixes include:

• gstplayer: Fix duration-changed CRITICAL warning if duration did not actually change
• gst-editing-services: group: Fix handling clips that are added to a layer
• vaapi: fix issues with native EGL display
• vaapi: h264 encoder negotiation fixes
• webrtc: Fix transportsendbin to fix spurious shut-down failures in webrtcbin if DTLS negotiation hasn’t completed yet.
• webrtc: Don’t deadlock on blocked pads on shutdown

For the full changelog where the above mentioned items have been sourced, click here.

Upcoming Upgrades

GCC

Peter will be performing a rebootstrap of our toolchain around GCC 8.2.0 this coming week.

KDE Applications

Peter has already upgrade our KDE Applications to 18.08.0 in unstable, so you can look forward to getting that in next week’s sync. Here’s a summary of some of the improvements to look forward to:

• Dolphin
  • Create New menu items are no longer available when viewing the track
  • The context menu now includes more useful options, allowing you to sort and change the view mode directly.
  • The Settings dialog has been modernized to follow design guidelines and be more intuitive.
  • Various memory leak fixes
• Konsole
  • The “Find” widget will now appear on the top of the window without disrupting your workflow.
• Gwenview
  • Gwenview’s statusbar now features an image counter and displays the total number of images.
  • It is now possible to sort by rating and in descending order. Sorting by date now separates directories and archives and was fixed in some situations.
  • Support for drag-and-drop has been improved to allow dragging files and folders to the View mode to display them, as well as dragging viewed items to external applications.
  • Enabled zooming by scrolling or clicking as well as panning also when the Crop or Red Eye Reduction tools are active.
  • Gwenview now zooms to the cursor’s current position for Zoom In/Out, Fill and 100% zoom operations when using the mouse and keyboard shortcuts.
• KMail
  • Improvements in the travel data extraction engine. It now supports UIC 918.3 and SNCF train ticket barcodes and Wikidata-powered train station location lookup.
  • Support for multi-traveler itineraries was added
  • Now has integration with the KDE Itinerary app.
• Spectacle
  • In Rectangular Region mode, there is now a magnifier to help you draw a pixel-perfect selection rectangle.

We encourage you to read the full announcement where the above mentioned items have been sourced, there is many more improvements!

Linux Kernel

Bryan has upgraded our linux-current kernel in unstable to 4.17.17 as well as introducing the following improvements:

• CONFIG_NR_CPUS has now been set to 64 for AMD Threadripper 32C/64T parts
• We’ve disabled CONFIG_COMPAT_VDSO to improve 32bit performance (benefits us for our emul32 enabled libs). This was largely in place to work around a bug in glibc and is no longer necessary.
• CONFIG_USELIB has been turned off.

PostgreSQL 10

We’ll be performing an upgrade to PostgreSQL 10 this coming week. If you have any databases using PostgreSQL, be sure to dump them prior to upgrading during next week’s sync, and re-import them after the upgrade. We suggest reading the Backup / Dump and Restore documentation for PostgresSQL 9.6.

Godot Reminder

Early this week we announced our upcoming upgrade to Godot 3. As of yesterday’s sync to stable, Godot users should now have Godot 3 available to them. If you use Godot and didn’t see our PSA, we highly recommend reading it.

If you experience any issues with Godot 3, we suggest checking our dedicated task.