The GNOME Foundation is supporting contributors with its fellowship program. You can help expand the fellowship program with a donation.

After the release of GNOME 51 in the previous month, this month was the time were people noticed the first regressions and bugs. Hence, a lot of work went into bug fixes this month.

RFC Process Landed

GNOME now has a project-wide RFC process. There were a few changes that happened this month, which further simplified the process and removed the special role of teams.

Since we have a consensus on a process now, I will supplement it with further documentation soon.

glycin

The CMYK support has been merged. You can check my last blog post for more details.

Another big change this month is the move from libjxl to jxl-rs. This is the same decoder now used by Chromium and Firefox. Thanks a lot to Wonwoo for the contribution and for all the people who fixed upstream issues that the GNOME implementation revealed.

Other than that, there were a lot of smaller things to address in glycin, most due to the GNOME 51 release:

• • Fix image loading getting stuck on systems with lowered sysctl net.core.wmem_default #334
  • Fix libglycin’s get_mime_types blocking main thread !487
  • Fix orientation not parsed correctly for some images with MakerNote Exif tag #332
  • Fix memory growth via filling up the channel in image-rs loader for animated images #338
  • Fix animation threads in image-rs not terminated until the loader process exits !491
  • Canonicalize loader paths when reading config #340
  • Fix Exif decoder panic I #329
  • Move JPEG XL loaders into the image-rs loader while keeping the C-based editor separate !495
  • Fix some .cur-files being detected as TGA files #345
  • Fix Exif decoder panic II #346
  • Fix libglycin panic in construction of GlyPixelDensity with invalid data #347

Image Viewer (Loupe)

Loupe benefits from the new CMYK support in glycin. Here is a comparison of nightly Loupe vs Loupe 50.

Loupe with latest glycin showing the CMYK image correctly and indicating the CMYK color model under Image Format. Loupe 51 showing wrong colors for a CMYK image with ICC profile. This ICC profile oversaturates the colors to print on uncoated paper that will absorb a lot of ink.

There are also some fixes that landed in Loupe this month:

• • Set physical dimensions of generated intermediate PDF for printing correctly #417 #613
  • Fix fractional scaling potentially blurring image rendering (see “Snapping”) #326
  • Show if image uses CMYK color model !621

Other Work

I reviewed Resources, which is currently incubating as a replacement GNOME Core app for System Monitor. I found a few minor issues. Other than that, the app is close to being ready for GNOME Core. A review from the Design Team is still outstanding.

A topic that has been causing me a headache for a while has been how to properly implement memory limitations for glycin and thumbnailer sandboxes. There currently is no perfect solution. It looks like I will go with cgroups outside Flatpaks created via StartTransientUnit, at least for glycin. I’m happy that we finally have a decision.

Support the GNOME Project

The GNOME Fellowships are funded by our community. If you would like to help the GNOME project to stay sustainable, please consider donating.