2.0-RC1

[lwindolf]

This is the first release candidate for the new 2.0 release line that contains the GTK4 port of Liferea.

Removed features:

Major porting efforts also have some side-effects and features being lost. Despite this rather
large refactoring almost all features stay as they are with the following exceptions:

• Dropped menu bar in favour of GtkHeader bar
• Dropped support for girepository-1.0
• Removed status bar in favour of raising toasts
• Trayicon plugin was removed as incompatible with GTK4

Known issues

This entirely new code base has still some issues:

• Item/feed list popup menus show overflow
• Some dialogs sometimes freeze

Please help with testing and report any bugs you discover!

Changes

* Build system switched from autotools to meson. Tarballs are now .tar.xz
  (Lars Windolf)

* All message dialogs and auth dialog are now modal.
  (Lars Windolf)

* Source UI definitions are now provided by a Cambalache 1.0 workflow, single source
  of truth for all .ui files is liferea.cmb
  (Lars Windolf)

* Ported code base to GTK4. Note that the port is a minimal port, a lot of
  GTK4 deprecated widgets (like GtkTreeView) are still in use. Those will be
  replaced over time.
  (Lars Windolf)

* New dependency libadwaita, some dialogs are already implemented as AdwDialog
  and AdwAlertDialog more will follow.
  (Lars Windolf)

* Removed HTML shortcut documentation in favour of GtkShortCutsWindow
  Also changed hotkey F1 to point a shortcuts
  (Lars Windolf)

* Changed simple search from a dialog to a search bar
  (Lars Windolf)

---

This discussion was created from the release 2.0-RC1.

[AndyM48]

Trayicon plugin was removed as incompatible with GTK4
The trayicon is an important feature for me, Can you reconsider removing it?

[lwindolf]

Sorry, I do not understand how adding a simple header suddenly gets the library active for the end user.

[MorsMortium]

https://github.com/charlesrocket/libstray/blob/trunk/stray.h It is small enough that the single header contains the entire source. It gets compiled into the program

[lwindolf]

Ah... I didn't scroll down far enough, now I see the implementation in there. Will have a look at it.

[lwindolf]

Hmm... I created a draft with #1542. Has a lot of implementation changes and one has to use a lot of undocumented libpeas2 interna. This is not fun and a "simply add stray.h". Spend the entire day on this. I know I'm leaving my frustration of having spend a summer day on this with you guys, but this constant underestimation of the actual effort for something "simple" is a real pain. Of course it is up to me to just say "no".

[MorsMortium]

I guess sorry for that. I don't use most GTK infrastructure, we build with a makefile, so until now I had no idea what libpeas2 was. That 144 loc file, a 9loc header, 10 lines of gschema settings and some weird 10 lines redefinition of usleep because of the C standard we use are all we have for the tray icon

[AndyM48]

I believe ayatana-appincidator is a somewhat limited. I suppose, to some extent. it depends on what one wants from the trayicon?

First thoughts are:

Minimum requirements

• Left click to Show/Hide liferea
• Icon changes when unread feeds are available

Secondary items:

• Right click menu: Update feeds - Mark feeds read - Minimise to tray on close (toggle) - Quit
• Icon overlay with number of unread feeds

I doubt that I am the one to help, I suppose it would be an opportunity to learn python :) Maybe someone else might take a look?

[sjehuda]

These functionalities are useful.

I hope to apply these.

[AndyM48]

Dropped menu bar in favour of GtkHeader bar

Would it be possible to make the original menu bar an option? I might be able to use gtk-nocsd but an option would be preferable.

[lwindolf]

There is no way to win this. It's either standing out in the GNOME world or in the non-GNOME world. May main driver for personal use and professional work is GNOME so far and I'm a bit biased and of course favour my own use case.

[MorsMortium]

If my GTK-NoCSD (https://codeberg.org/MorsMortium/GTK-NoCSD) is the one mentioned, that works well with GTK4 and libadwaita apps. And if there are issues I usually look at them ASAP

[AndyM48]

There is no way to win this

On the contrary, there is an easy win. Default to the GTK/Gnome CSD style, but have an option to use the old menu bar instead.

[MorsMortium]

Libadwaita, which is used, does not support CSD-less windows, if you just unset the CSD it crashes the app, intentionally. But there are some things, which can be done, like what I did in the library, not the current version, that depends on preloading, but a version before the code that crashes the app can be circumvented by adding a bin layout as layout manager to the window and only unsetting CSD after that, or a less hacky thing which was using regular GTK, not libadwaita windows, based on some setting

[AndyM48]

OK, I was wrong.
Looks like we are wasting @lwindolf 's time with this. I can simply use @MorsMortium 's app to revert to the old style menu bar.

Sorry for having taken your time and thank you all for considering this point.

[AndyM48]

I took a look at 2.0-RC1, and then reinstalled 1.16.7 from the Artix repos.
Now I am getting the error:

$ /usr/bin/liferea

(net.sourceforge.liferea:4101): GLib-GIO-ERROR **: 17:03:07.038: Settings schema 'net.sf.liferea' does not contain a key named 'enable-plugins'
Aborted                    /usr/bin/liferea

Any ideas?

[sjehuda]

I advise to ask at Artix Forum, if you did not yet.

I might try Liferea 2.0-RC1 with my Artix computer, so we have more information.

[AndyM48]

Worked fine before installing 2.0-RC1. The error is strange because /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/net.sf.liferea.gschema.xml does include 'enable-plugins'

$ cat /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/net.sf.liferea.gschema.xml | grep enable-plugins
    <key name="enable-plugins" type="b">

but the error is still there after recompiling the schemas

# glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas

[lwindolf]

@AndyM48 That is strange. Worst case do a sudo make install from 1.16 code base to fix it.

[AndyM48]

Thanks, tried that and I am still getting the same error.

[AndyM48]

Sorted:

I installed 2.0-RC1 to /usr/local (the default), this recompiled the gschemas.compiled file in /usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas.

It seems that this file was overriding the /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas one.

[AndyM48]

Feature request:

Would you consider adding a number label to 'Flagged' to indicate the number of flagged items (both read and unread) in the database? This would simply be the total of the 'marked' column in the 'items' table.

[lwindolf]

One this that could be implemented would be a checkbox to the search folder properties that we have a check box that allows defining whether to show the total amount of items or the unread count.

The "Flagged" search folder itself should not be special in any kind of way. But with such a checkbox you could switch its behaviour.

[AndyM48]

Sound perfect to me

The reason for my including all the items, whether read or not, is that my habit is to run through all the descriptions of the articles shown in the preview window, and then mark as flagged any that I want to investigate further. Of course these will have all been marked as read already.

Thank you

[lwindolf]

Implemented with 3e2444c for now a slight disadvantage is that the counter looks the same like the unread counters. I'll check at a later point how to use adwaita accent colors to possibly differentiate there.

[AndyM48]

I would like to help debug 2.0
I know that the code is in 'main', but I am not sure how to download it?

[lwindolf]

Its a standard meson build so you first clone with

 git clone https://github.com/lwindolf/liferea.git

If you are new to open source builds you can use GNOME Builder to clone the repo, install all dependencies and build it. Let me know if you have problems.

[AndyM48]

Thanks - my mistake, I thought I could compile it and run it from the build directory without installing it. It is OK now.

Edit: actually that command only downloads 2.0-RC1, excluding your subsequent updates.

[lwindolf]

Running from the build directory only is harder as you need to provide the gsettings schema to the binary. GNOME Builder does this.

Regarding the "git clone" command, you get the latest 2.0 code and should be able to update to the latest changes with "git pull" at any moment. When contribution in open source I fear you need to spend a short time (1-2 hours on a good tutorial) on learning git as it is a widely used standard tool.

[AndyM48]

Thank you