Hi! February is FOSDEM month, and as usual I’ve come to Brussels to meet with a lot of other FOSS developers and exchange ideas. I like to navigate between the buildings and along the hallways to find nice people to discuss with. This edition I’ve been involved in the new modern e-mail devroom and I’ve given a talk about IMAP with Damian, a fellow IMAP library maintainer and organizer of this devroom. The whole weekend was great!

In wlroots news, I’ve worked on multi-connector atomic commits. Right now, wlroots sequentially configures outputs, one at a time. This is slow and makes it impossible to properly handle GPU limitations such as bandwidth: if the GPU cannot drive two outputs with a 4k resolution, we’ll only find out after the first one has been lit up. As a result we can’t properly implement fallbacks and this results in black screens on some setups. In particular, on Intel some users need to set WLR_DRM_NO_MODIFIERS=1 to have their multi-output setup work correctly. The multi-connector atomic commit work is the first step to resolve these situations and also results in faster modesets. The second step will be to add fallback logic to use a less bandwidth-intensive scanout buffer on modeset.

While working on the wlroots DRM backend code, I’ve also taken the opportunity to cleanup the internals and skip unnecessary modesets when switching between VTs. Ctrl Alt 1 should be faster now! I’ve also tried to resurrect the ext-screencopy-v1 protocol, required for capturing individual windows. I’ve pushed a new version and reworked the wlroots implementation, hopefully I can find some more time next month to continue on this front.

Sway 1.9-rc4 has been recently released, my reading of the tea leaves at my disposal indicates that the final release may be shipped soon. Sway 1.9 will leverage the new wlroots rendering API, however it does not include the huge scene-graph rework that Alexander has pushed forward in the last year or so. Sway 1.10 will be the first release to include this major overhaul and all the niceties it unlocks. And Sway 1.10 will also finally support input method popups (used for CJK among other things) thanks to efforts by Access and Tadeo Kondrak.

The NPotM is sinwon, a simple OAuth 2 server for small deployments. I’ve long been trying to find a good solution to delegate authentication to a single service and provide single-sign-on for my personal servers. I’ve come to like OAuth 2 because it’s a standard, it’s not tied to another use-case (like IMAP or SMTP is), and it prevents other services from manipulating user passwords directly. sinwon stores everything in a SQLite database, and it’s pretty boring: no fancy cryptography usage for tokens, no fancy cloud-grade features. I like boring. sinwon has a simple UI to manage users and OAuth clients (sometimes called “apps”). Still missing are refresh tokens, OAuth scopes, an audit log, personal access tokens, and more advanced features such as TOTP, device authorization grants and mTLS. Patches welcome!

I’ve continued my work to make it easier to contribute to the SourceHut codebase. Setting up PGP keys is now optional to run a SourceHut instance, and a local S3-compatible server (such as minio) can be used without TLS. Thorben Günther has added paste.sr.ht to sr.ht-container-compose. I’m also working on making services use meta.sr.ht’s GraphQL API instead of maintaining their own copy of the user’s profile, but more needs to be done there.

And now for the random collection of smaller updates… The soju IRC bouncer and the goguma IRC client for mobile devices now support file uploads: no need to use an external service anymore to share a screenshot or picture in an IRC conversation. Conrad Hoffmann and Thomas Müller have added support for multiple address books to the go-webdav library, as well as creating/deleting address books and calendars. I’ve modernized the FreeDesktop e-mail server setup with SPF, DKIM and DMARC. KDE developers have contributed a new layer-shell minor version to support docking their panel to a corner of the screen.

That’s all for now, see you next month!