AbiWord

Working on rebasing and finishing an "old" patch from Michael Gorse that implement accessibility in AbiWord. While the patch is a few years old, it's perfectly rebasable.

Pushed a lot of code modernisation on master, as well as various memory leaks and crashes on stable.

Released 3.0.7 (tag, and flatpak build). 3.0.8 might come soon as I'm backporting more crashers that are already fixed on master. Until I have a 3.1.90 version ready for testing.

libopenraw

Finally I have Fujifilm X-Trans demosaicking, which needs more work as it is still a crude port of the dcraw C code. A also apply the white balance. Added few new cameras and some benchmarks.

Finally I released 0.4.0-alpha.11.

Also I did update libopenraw-view which is my GUI for testing libopenraw. It now renders asynchronously.

Supporting cast

Some other various stuff.

glycin

The merge request to update libopenraw was merged. Thanks to Sophie!

gegl-rs

Updated gegl-rs to the new glib-rs.

lrcat-extractor

Released a new version after updating rusqlite.

Niepce

Ported to the latest gtk4-rs, hence the update to gegl-rs. Some small API changes in the object subclassing needed to be handled.

May and June in one convenient location.

libopenraw

Released 0.4.0.alpha10

After that, added Nikon Z5 II and P1100, Sony 6400A and RX100M7A, Panasonic S1II and S1IIE, DJI Mavic 3 Pro Cinema (support for Nikon and Sony mostly incomplete, so is Panasonic decompression), Fujifilm X-E5 and OM Systems OM-5 II.

gnome-raw-thumbnailer

Updated to the latest libopenraw.

Released 48.0

flathub-cli

This is a project I started a while ago but put on the back burner due to scheduling conflict. It's a command line tool to integrate all the tasks of maintaining flatpak packages for flathub. Some stuff isn't flathub specific though. I already have a bunch of scripts I use, and this is meant to be next level. It also merges into it my previous tool, flatpak-manifest-generator, an interactive tool to generate flatpak manifests.

One thing I had left in progress and did finish implementing at least the basics is the cleanup command to purge downloads. The rationale is that when you update a package manifest, you change the sources. But the old ones that have been downloaded are still kept. The cleanup downloads command will find these unused sources and delete them for you. I really needed this.

flathub-cli is written in Rust.

AbiWord

Fixing some annoying bugs (regressions) in master, some memory leakage in both stable and master, a lot of in the Gtk UI code. I also fixed a crash when editing lists in 3.0.6 that was due to some code not touched since 2004, and even then that part is probably even older. The short story is that updating a value in the StringMap<> updated the key whose pointer ended up being help somewhere else. Yep, dangling pointer. The fix was to not update the key if it is the same.

On master only, I also started fixing the antiquated C++ syntax. For some reason in C++ there was a lot of typedef enum and typedef struct, probably an artifact of the late 90's code origin. At the same time moved to #pragma once for header includes. Let the compiler handle it. Also fixed a crash with saving a document with revisions.

Some links for technical articles on various topics I read.

std::mem is... interesting - Explore some of the functionalities in the std::mem module of the Rust standard library.

How much code does that proc macro generate? - Nicholas Nethercote tells us how you can answer this question with new tooling in the Rust toolchain.

PNG is back - A quick overview of the PNG spec 3. Spoiler: Animated PNG, HDR support and Exif support.

JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress) - How the JavaScript ecosystem is over complicated for no reason with only making the user facing stuff worse.

QtWayland 6.6 Brings Robustness Through Compositor Handoffs - Improvements in Wayland support in Qt 6.6, brought to kwin (KDE compositor), fixing some stuff that Wayland should better at than X11, but ended up being worse.

jemalloc Postmortem - jemalloc from its inception to the end.

April was light.

exempi

Released Exempi 2.6.6 to fix security issues from upstream.

libopenraw

Some minor fixes in the thumbnail extraction, with JXL support and locate larger Panasonic previews. Extract the exposure bias for Fuijfilm files. Added the latest Canon cameras (still the support of CR3 is work in progress).

Released alpha.10 on May 1st.

Some links for technical articles on various topics I read.

The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time - Explains the proposal for the next C language standard for defer.

A guide to implement ActivityPub in a static site (or any website) - A guide to implement ActivityPub in a static website.

20 years of git - An history of git and its early days.

Celebrating Git's 20th anniversary with creator Linus Torvalds - An interview with Linus Torvalds on the 20 years of git.

I use Zip Bombs to Protect my Server - A technique of serving compressed zeros that a lot of bots don't handle properly.

6 usability improvements in GCC 15 - New in a GCC 15 near you, better error messages.

A long overdue dev log. The last one was for September 2024. That's half a year.

libopenraw

Released 0.4.0-alpha9 of the Rust crate. Added a bunch of cameras. Fixed some Maker Note for some Fujifilm camera, and a fews other, also fixed some thumbnailing.

The main API is now faillible with Result<> returned. This should reduce the amount of panics (it shouldn't panic).

Added support for user crops in Fujifilm files as I added support for the GFX 100RF (sight unseen).

Niepce

Changed the catalog format. By changed, it's just that it has an extension .npcat and that it is standalone instead of being a folder. The thumbnail cache will be in the same folder next to it.

Now we can open a different catalog. Also renamed some bits internally to be consistent with the naming.

Removed some UI CSS hacks now that the is an API for Gtk.TreeExpander.set_hide_expander() in Gtk 4.10. Fixed some bug with the treeview not being updated. Removed Gtk.ColorButton (deprecated). Fix some selection issues with the Gtk.ListView.

Moved to Rust 2024.

Added video thumbnailing. Code was inspired from Totem's.

Fixed some bugs with importing hierarchies of folders, and fix deleting a folder with folders.

Still working on the import feature I mentionned previously. It is getting there. My biggest issue that one can't select a Gtk.ListView item by item, only by index, which is complicated on a tree view. On the other hand several of the fixes mentionned above came from this work as I cherry-picked the patches to the main branch.

i18n-format

Fixed my i18n-format crate as the minor version of gettext removed the essential feature I was relying on. Yes this is a semver breakage. I ended up having to split the crate to have a non macro crate. From a usage standpoint it works the same.

The long term is to have this crate be unnecessary.

Other

Other stuff I contributed to.

Glycin

Submitted support for the rotation of camera raw files, and the Loupe counterpart. This is a followup to the camera raw file support in glycin.

Some links for technical articles on various topics I read.

NVIDIA emulation journey, part 1: RIVA 128 / NV3 architecture history and basic overview - From the developers of 86Box emulators, some history and technical summary about the first successful 3D GPU from Nvidia.

zlib-rs is faster than C - Something on the reimplementation of zlib in Rust, and how it performs better. Safe + speed, pick 2.

Understanding ActivityPub Part 1 to 4. - A four part explainer on how ActivityPub, the protocol behind the Fediverse, works.

Memory safety for web fonts - Chrome developers explain how they are replacing freetype to a memory safe solution, written in Rust, called Skrifa.

GIMP 3.0 released - Aleksandr Prokudin summarize what's new in the long awaited GIMP 3.0. Don't forget his weekly writeups of Libre Arts updates.

A long overdue dev log. The last one was for September 2023. That's a year. Stuff in life has happened.

Compiano

In November I switched Compiano to use pipewire directly for sound. This mean removing bits of UI too.

I should look at a release, but I have a few blockers I need to tackle. One key element is that there is a mechanism to download the soundbanks and for now it doesn't ask consent to do so. I don't want a release without this.

Raw thumbnailer

I already posted about it.

libopenraw

Lot has happened on that front. I want it to be a foundation of Niepce and others.

First adding it to glycin triggered an alpha release on crates.io. There started a long cycle of alpha release, we are at alpha 8 as of now. Various changes:

• Added the mp4parse crate directly as a module. A key reason is that I already used a fork so it complicate things. Maybe I should make these few bits upstreamable and use upstream.
• Added a mime types API
• Save up a lot of RAM when doing colour interpolation: it's done in place instead of allocating a new buffer. This is significant as this is done using a 64-bit float per component.
• Fixed the rendering in many ways. The only thing it needs it to apply the colour balance.
• Fixed unpack or decompression of Olympus and Fuji files.
• Got an external contribution: Panasonic decompression. This made me fix the loading of uncompressed Panasonic raw too. The more recent Panasonic cameras are still failing though, there is a subtle variant that needs to be handled.

Still missing from rendering: recent Nikon and all their exotic variants and compression scheme, Canon CR3, GoPro, Sony.

Niepce

Not so much work directly done on Niepce in the last few month, but still.

Ongoing features

Started a while ago some work towards the import and a rework of the catalog (the main data storage).

The former is the implementation of a workflow that allow immporting images into the catalog.

The latter involve reworking the catalog to become a self contained storage as a sqlite3 database. One step I already did was to use it to store the catalog preferences instead of a separate file. This should also include fixing the UI open, creating, switching.

This big two things are user visible and are a stop forward what I want to happen as an internal milestone. Then I can start pluging the library import and maybe import my picture vault. A good starting point towards managing the collection, but not really for photo editing yet. Gotta make choices.

Images

Implemented support for HEIF which is being adopted by camera manufacturers.

I updated the RT engine to 5.11 which came with RawTherapee 5.11. This is still a soft work of the code base to use strip out Gtk3 and a more recent version of glibmm. The latter patch might no longer be needed as I have since removed gtkmm from Niepce.

I also implemented the GEGL pipeline using gegl-rs, which I took over to make it useful. At one I shall try to figure out how to write a loader in Rust to use libopenraw with GEGL.

Cleanups

The UI is slowly moving to use blueprint, and I removed all the first-party C++ code outside of bindings, no more Gtkmm and Glibmm is only here because RT engine needs it.

Other

Stuff I contributed to.

STF

I took part to the STF effort and worked on fixing issues with the desktop portal. The big chunk of the work related to the USB portal, taking over code by Georges that is itself based on code by Ryan. It spreads through multiple component of the stack: flatpak, xdg-desktop-portal, xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, libportal and ashpd.

I also did a bunch of bug fixes, crashes, memory leaks, etc in flatpak, flatpak-builder, and the rest of the stack.

I also implemented issue #1 for flatpak-builder: easy renaming of MIME files and icons, and also properly fixing the id in the appstream file, a common problem in flatpak.

Glycin

Glycin is a sandboxed image loader. I did implement the raw camera loader using libopenraw. It's written in Rust, so is libopenraw now. Thank you Sophie for merging it.

Poppler

Jeff was complaining about a file being super slow, with sysprof flamegraph. That picked my curiosity and looked at it. The peculiarity of the document is that it has 16000 pages and a lot of cross references.

This lead to two patches:

• The first one is in 24.06. There was a loop, calling for the length of the container at each iteration. Turns out this is protected by a mutex and that's a lot of time spend for nothing since the value is immutable. Call it once before the loop and voila.

• The other one, merged for 24.09 change that loop to be a hash table lookup. The problem is that it want to locate the page by object reference, but iterate through the page list. Lots of ref and lots of a page mean even more iterator. The more complex approach is when building the page cache (it's done on demand), we build a reference to page index map. And the slow code is no longer slow and almost disappear from the flamegraphs.

This make Evince and Okular faster to open that document and any presenting similar attribute: a lot of bookmarks.

I have resurrected my camera old raw thumbnailer so that I can browse directories full of of camera raw images in Nautilus. This is version 47.0.1, because GNOME 47 is out.

Like the old one, it uses libopenraw to extract the previews from the raw files.

But, it now supports more raw formats, and if needed will render the raw image to generate a preview, like it has to for my old Ricoh GR Digital II images (the one from 2007). This leverage libopenraw 0.4.0 (still in alpha stage) that has been rewritten in Rust.

Sadly to get is in the hands of users the only good solution is a distribution package. At the time of writing there is none, but I put together smething that allowed me to build a package for Fedora 40 to install on my big rig.

If you feel like it you can download the source code from GNOME, and the repository is on GNOME gitlab.

This is how it looks with Nautilus 46 with a bunch of images from my old Olympus E-P1:

It's October 2023.

Niepce

Really very little.

Fixed a cosmetic issues with icons in the workspace. The short version is that for symbolic icons to work, they must be in a "standard" path even if they are loaded from resources.

Also some minor dependency checks, etc.

lrcat-extractor

lrcat-extractor is my Rust crate to export Lightroom™ catalogs. It's used in Niepce. Just a few bits of maintenance, like replacing docopt with clap for the dumper tool, and using thiserror.

aplib-extractor

aplib-extractor is the sibling of lrcat-extractor, a crate to export Aperture™ libraries. This is actually the oldest and one of my first projects in Rust, which really shows. I worked on adding missing features so that I can implement the importer in Niepce, including listing the volumes.

The reasoning in implementing the import is to help refine the data model in Niepce to be able to handle the structure of an Aperture™ library as it offer organizational features that Ligthroom™ doesn't. This actually might lead to deeper changes in Niepce internal design.

Once the importer works, I will release the crate officially as I'll know the API is sound.

Dia on Gtk3

Two years after I started it, and mostly drop the ball, the GTK 3 port of Dia has been merged.

I also fixed a few other small issues, including some memory leaks.