Mir 1.4.0 Release

Mir 1.4.0 Release

We’re pleased to announce the release of Mir 1.4.0.

For Ubuntu, Mir is available from the Mir PPAs. It is also available as a source tarball.

Wayland layer-shell

This release is mostly about supporting Mir based shells using Sway’s layer-shell extension protocol. @sophie-w has been using this for his work with MATE Wayland.

The mirclient API support

We’ve been saying for some time that we will be dropping support for clients using the mirclient API in favour of Wayland. In practice, support for clients using the mirclient API has remained unchanged for the last two years.

Because of these warnings downstream projects have mostly dropped support for the mirclient API. The notable exception being UBports and their Ubuntu Touch phone.

So far we’ve kept the existing code intact but not extended it for new work. In particular, we have not implemented support for mirclient API on EGLstream and are not planning to support it for other graphics platforms. (UBports are supporting it themselves for their phone based graphics platform.)

We’ve now taken the first step towards removing this support: Mir now defaults (at runtime) to not providing mirclient API support. It can still be enabled on the command line --enable-mirclient, in the environment MIR_SERVER_ENABLE_MIRCLIENT=foo, or in the .config file enable-mirclient=.

As part of this change we’ve updated the scripts used in our examples so that these no longer depend on the mir-socket used by this library. (Except on Xenial where gtk-mir and qtubuntu-desktop are the default.)

Changelog

ABI summary:

  • mirserver ABI bumped to 50
    ###Enhancements:
  • [MirAL] Support for exclusive zones
  • [Wayland] Many Layer Shell improvements
  • [mirclient] Make the mirclient socket optional and disabled by default
  • [mir-utils] Delete mirrun and mirbacklight
  • [mir-demos] Replace using miral-wayland in the scripts with a name of the form wayland-[0-9]

Bugs fixed:

  • [Wayland] To accommodate GTK3 publish bespoke extensions before wl_seat. (Fixes #922)
  • [Wayland] Handle mir_event_type_close_window. (Fixes #946)
  • [Wayland] Send wl_buffer.release on the Wayland thread. (Fixes #951)
  • [wlcs test fixture] Fix command-line processing so that --wayland-extensions can be used. (Fixes #906)
  • Add header that needs to be explicitly included for protobuf 3.8. (Fixes #913)
  • Track registering miral::WaylandExtensions objects with mir::Servers and error if there is more than one. (Fixes #875)
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Is anything happening with Unity 8?

That is a question for the Unity8 forum.

Your last reply on that was sometime in April, so the question.

Members of the UBports team discussed Unity8 for the desktop during Ubuntu Touch Q&A 55, starting at about 40:10.

Some discussion also can be found here and here.

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Great job @alan_g! I love the work being done on Mir and really enjoy the YouTube videos made by @sophie-w MATE on Mir . Keep up the great work you two!

Mir 1.4.0 is now available in Fedora 29 and newer. :wink:

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