Hi, here are my Gemini-assisted minutes for this week's meeting:
Meeting Attendance and Logistics: Matthias Clasen opened the meeting, noting that Michael Catanzaro would be taking notes for the month. Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) mentioned that they would be absent the following week due to travel commitments for Flock.
Libcanberra Dependency Removal: Matthias Clasen initiated a discussion on removing the libcanberra dependency, which is still required by several desktop packages in Fedora, including GNOME Shell and MATE. Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) noted that it affects three out of six desktop environments in Fedora, as it is deeply wired into notification systems. Because upstream libcanberra has been abandoned for approximately 14 years, the consensus was to remove this dependency. Matthias Clasen took the action to contact GNOME Shell maintainers, such as Florian or Jonas, to discuss rerouting sounds to PipeWire instead. (This discussion was prompted by the orphaning of libcanberra; however, a new maintainer has fortunately already taken the package, so the immediate problem is already resolved.)
Showtime Package Status: The group discussed the status of the Showtime package, which Michael Catanzaro reported is currently orphaned. Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) clarified that because the package was previously maintained by a member of the KDE SIG who no longer wishes to carry it, it requires a new human maintainer to continue. The participants agreed that since SIGs cannot own packages directly, the project remains in need of a volunteer.
Replacing GNOME Keyring with 007: Matthias Clasen proposed replacing the gnome-keyring daemon with 007. Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) committed to managing this transition for Fedora Workstation, as they are already performing the same task for Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop to maintain consistency. The discussion highlighted the complexity of the migration, which will involve updating PAM configurations. Participants also noted that applications such as Seahorse might need updates to handle 007's ability to lock individual items rather than just the entire keyring. Matthias Clasen agreed to install and test Key Rack, a modern application that might serve as a suitable replacement for managing secrets.
Removing dbus-daemon: The team explored strategies to remove dbus-daemon to avoid installing both the daemon and dbus-broker concurrently. Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) identified that dbus-daemon is pulled in by dependencies like Anaconda and various network management tools. Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) committed to investigating how to modify Anaconda's dependency to prevent it from pulling in dbus-daemon when it is not needed. Matthias Clasen took the action to contact the Anaconda team to discuss the possibility of the installer self-removing the package after installation, which would solve a long-standing issue present in most other major installers.
Replacing xvfb-run with wl-headless-run: Matthias Clasen asked about replacing the xvfb-run utility with wl-headless-run for testing purposes. Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) confirmed that this is the correct approach for modern testing environments. To ensure incremental progress, Matthias Clasen proposed adding this replacement to the package duty checklist, allowing maintainers to update packages to the new standard during regular maintenance.
LibreOffice Dictionaries: Jens-Ulrik Petersen provided an update on the team's efforts to package LibreOffice dictionaries to address coverage gaps in Fedora. The group discussed the difficulty of performing direct replacements for existing aspell dictionaries, noting that technical differences and divergence make a simple swap unfeasible in some cases. The consensus was to make the LibreOffice dictionaries available in parallel, allowing users to select them, with the eventual goal of phasing out older, unmaintained dictionaries.
Internationalization: The meeting concluded with a discussion on the high quality of internationalization and localization work in the GNOME and KDE stacks, which are capable of rendering complex scripts like Mongolian.
Marketing: Matthias Clasen and Neal Gompa (Conan Kudo) agreed to create a tracking ticket to document new features and coordinate marketing efforts before final releases.
desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org
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Michael Catanzaro