BlueZ 5 (was: Re: Blocker bug review ahead of freeze)

[Kalev Lember <kalevlember gmail com>]

Hi Dominique,

Bastien Nocera, who's been leading the GNOME effort to switch to BlueZ 5
is currently on vacation. I don't know all the details but I'll try to
reply with what I know.

I'll add Gustavo Padovan to CC as well if he wants to add anything.

In Fedora, we've decided to bite the bullet and switch to BlueZ 5, as of
three days ago. This is planned for the F20 release that's due in November.

I've personally been aware of the plan for GNOME to switch to BlueZ 5 in
3.10 for a while. But that's maybe because I do distro packaging and
follow release notes :)

gnome-bluetooth 3.9.3 that switched to BlueZ 5 and dropped BlueZ 4
support was released back in June,
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/ftp-release-list/2013-June/msg00095.html .

Several other GNOME related modules switched to BlueZ 5 at the same
time: gnome-control-center and gnome-shell. The switch might not have
been obvious though because things kept _building_ fine. We use BlueZ
through DBus, so the new gnome-bluetooth / gnome-shell /
gnome-control-center releases would only want BlueZ 5 at _runtime_.

I sent a summary report about this to fedora-devel ML yesterday, and it
covers some other DE issues as well if you are interested,
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-August/187738.html

Basically we have:

 ported:
   gnome-bluetooth
   gnome-shell
   gnome-control-center

 ported, but no release yet:
   pulseaudio (support in git, release supposed to come in September)
   NetworkManager (patches currently in bugzilla)

 not getting ported for 3.10:
   gnome-user-share


On 08/16/2013 04:39 PM, Dominique Leuenberger a.k.a. Dimstar wrote:
> And I don't think NM is even the only piece in the GNOME stack affected;
> from a quick glance, I can see at least also:
> * GVFS (backend; can probably be disabled).
> * gnokii (seems those Nokia phones just don't die!)
> * gnome-phone-manager (mostly obsolete I guess).

Bastien mentioned in
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2013-July/msg00029.html
that the ObexFTP support in currently lacking and that gnome-user-share
won't get ported for 3.10. I assume the same applies to the GVFS ObexFTP
as well.


> And stuff outside of the reach of GNOME:
> * PulseAudio (has a bluetooth module)

PulseAudio has support for both BlueZ 4 and 5 in git and they are
actively working on improving it.

> * qemu (bring BT support to VMs)

No idea about qemu, but it does seem to _link_ with libbluetooth as
opposed to using the DBus API. The library is in deprecated status, but
the API / ABI didn't change between BlueZ 4 and 5, so perhaps qemu can
continue working.

Hope this helps,
Kalev