Michael Catanzaro's Blog

Category: GNOME

  • An Update on WebKit Security Updates

    One year ago, I wrote a blog post about WebKit security updates that attracted a fair amount of attention at the time. For a full understanding of the situation, you really have to read the whole thing, but the most important point was that, while WebKitGTK+ — one of the two WebKit ports present in Linux distributions — was regularly releasing upstream security updates, most Linux distributions were ignoring the updates, leaving users vulnerable to various security bugs, mainly of the remote code execution variety. At the time of that blog post, only Arch Linux and Fedora were regularly releasing WebKitGTK+ updates, and Fedora had only very recently begun doing so comprehensively.

    Progress report!

    So how have things changed in the past year? The best way to see this is to look at the versions of WebKitGTK+ in currently-supported distributions. The latest version of WebKitGTK+ is 2.14.3, which fixes 13 known security issues present in 2.14.2. Do users of the most popular Linux operating systems have the fixes?

    • Fedora users are good. Both Fedora 24 and Fedora 25 have the latest version, 2.14.3.
    • If you use Arch, you know you always have the latest stuff.
    • Ubuntu users rejoice: 2.14.3 updates have been released to users of both Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10. I’m very  pleased that Ubuntu has decided to take my advice and make an exception to its usual stable release update policy to ensure its users have a secure version of WebKit. I can’t give Ubuntu an A grade here because the updates tend to lag behind upstream by several months, but slow updates are much better than no updates, so this is undoubtedly a huge improvement. (Anyway, it’s hardly a bad idea to be cautious when releasing a big update with high regression potential, as is unfortunately the case with even stable WebKit updates.) But if you use the still-supported Ubuntu 14.04 or 12.04, be aware that these versions of Ubuntu cannot ever update WebKit, as it would require a switch to WebKit2, a major API change.
    • Debian does not update WebKit as a matter of policy. The latest release, Debian 8.7, is still shipping WebKitGTK+ 2.6.2. I count 184 known vulnerabilities affecting it, though that’s an overcount as we did not exclude some Mac-specific security issues from the 2015 security advisories. (Shipping ancient WebKit is not just a security problem, but a user experience problem too. Actually attempting to browse the web with WebKitGTK+ 2.6.2 is quite painful due to bugs that were fixed years ago, so please don’t try to pretend it’s “stable.”) Note that a secure version of WebKitGTK+ is available for those in the know via the backports repository, but this does no good for users who trust Debian to provide them with security updates by default without requiring difficult configuration. Debian testing users also currently have the latest 2.14.3, but you will need to switch to Debian unstable to get security updates for the foreseeable future, as testing is about to freeze.
    • For openSUSE users, only Tumbleweed has the latest version of WebKit. The current stable release, Leap 42.2, ships with WebKitGTK+ 2.12.5, which is coincidentally affected by exactly 42 known vulnerabilities. (I swear I am not making this up.) The previous stable release, Leap 42.1, originally released with WebKitGTK+ 2.8.5 and later updated to 2.10.7, but never past that. It is affected by 65 known vulnerabilities. (Note: I have to disclose that I told openSUSE I’d try to help out with that update, but never actually did. Sorry!) openSUSE has it a bit harder than other distros because it has decided to use SUSE Linux Enterprise as the source for its GCC package, meaning it’s stuck on GCC 4.8 for the foreseeable future, while WebKit requires GCC 4.9. Still, this is only a build-time requirement; it’s not as if it would be impossible to build with Clang instead, or a custom version of GCC. I would expect WebKit updates to be provided to both currently-supported Leap releases.
    • Gentoo has the latest version of WebKitGTK+, but only in testing. The latest version marked stable is 2.12.5, so this is a serious problem if you’re following Gentoo’s stable channel.
    • Mageia has been updating WebKit and released a couple security advisories for Mageia 5, but it seems to be stuck on 2.12.4, which is disappointing, especially since 2.12.5 is a fairly small update. The problem here does not seem to be lack of upstream release monitoring, but rather lack of manpower to prepare the updates, which is a typical problem for small distros.
    • The enterprise distros from Red Hat, Oracle, and SUSE do not provide any WebKit security updates. They suffer from the same problem as Ubuntu’s old LTS releases: the WebKit2 API change  makes updating impossible. See my previous blog post if you want to learn more about that. (SUSE actually does have WebKitGTK+ 2.12.5 as well, but… yeah, 42.)

    So results are clearly mixed. Some distros are clearly doing well, and others are struggling, and Debian is Debian. Still, the situation on the whole seems to be much better than it was one year ago. Most importantly, Ubuntu’s decision to start updating WebKitGTK+ means the vast majority of Linux users are now receiving updates. Thanks Ubuntu!

    To arrive at the above vulnerability totals, I just counted up the CVEs listed in WebKitGTK+ Security Advisories, so please do double-check my counting if you want. The upstream security advisories themselves are worth mentioning, as we have only been releasing these for two years now, and the first year was pretty rough when we lost our original security contact at Apple shortly after releasing the first advisory: you can see there were only two advisories in all of 2015, and the second one was huge as a result of that. But 2016 seems to have gone decently well. WebKitGTK+ has normally been releasing most security fixes even before Apple does, though the actual advisories and a few remaining fixes normally lag behind Apple by roughly a month or so. Big thanks to my colleagues at Igalia who handle this work.

    Challenges ahead

    There are still some pretty big problems remaining!

    First of all, the distributions that still aren’t releasing regular WebKit updates should start doing so.

    Next, we have to do something about QtWebKit, the other big WebKit port for Linux, which stopped receiving security updates in 2013 after the Qt developers decided to abandon the project. The good news is that Konstantin Tokarev has been working on a QtWebKit fork based on WebKitGTK+ 2.12, which is almost (but not quite yet) ready for use in distributions. I hope we are able to switch to use his project as the new upstream for QtWebKit in Fedora 26, and I’d encourage other distros to follow along. WebKitGTK+ 2.12 does still suffer from those 42 vulnerabilities, but this will be a big improvement nevertheless and an important stepping stone for a subsequent release based on the latest version of WebKitGTK+. (Yes, QtWebKit will be a downstream of WebKitGTK+. No, it will not use GTK+. It will work out fine!)

    It’s also time to get rid of the old WebKitGTK+ 2.4 (“WebKit1”), which all distributions currently parallel-install alongside modern WebKitGTK+ (“WebKit2”). It’s very unfortunate that a large number of applications still depend on WebKitGTK+ 2.4 — I count 41 such packages in Fedora — but this old version of WebKit is affected by over 200 known vulnerabilities and really has to go sooner rather than later. We’ve agreed to remove WebKitGTK+ 2.4 and its dependencies from Fedora rawhide right after Fedora 26 is branched next month, so they will no longer be present in Fedora 27 (targeted for release in November). That’s bad for you if you use any of the affected applications, but fortunately most of the remaining unported applications are not very important or well-known; the most notable ones that are unlikely to be ported in time are GnuCash (which won’t make our deadline) and Empathy (which is ported in git master, but is not currently in a  releasable state; help wanted!). I encourage other distributions to follow our lead here in setting a deadline for removal. The alternative is to leave WebKitGTK+ 2.4 around until no more applications are using it. Distros that opt for this approach should be prepared to be stuck with it for the next 10 years or so, as the remaining applications are realistically not likely to be ported so long as zombie WebKitGTK+ 2.4 remains available.

    These are surmountable problems, but they require action by downstream distributions. No doubt some distributions will be more successful than others, but hopefully many distributions will be able to fix these problems in 2017. We shall see!

  • On Epiphany Security Updates and Stable Branches

    One of the advantages of maintaining a web browser based on WebKit, like Epiphany, is that the vast majority of complexity is contained within WebKit. Epiphany itself doesn’t have any code for HTML parsing or rendering, multimedia playback, or JavaScript execution, or anything else that’s actually related to displaying web pages: all of the hard stuff is handled by WebKit. That means almost all of the security problems exist in WebKit’s code and not Epiphany’s code. While WebKit has been affected by over 200 CVEs in the past two years, and those issues do affect Epiphany, I believe nobody has reported a security issue in Epiphany’s code during that time. I’m sure a large part of that is simply because only the bad guys are looking, but the attack surface really is much, much smaller than that of WebKit. To my knowledge, the last time we fixed a security issue that affected a stable version of Epiphany was 2014.

    Well that streak has unfortunately ended; you need to make sure to update to Epiphany 3.22.6, 3.20.7, or 3.18.11 as soon as possible (or Epiphany 3.23.5 if you’re testing our unstable series). If your distribution is not already preparing an update, insist that it do so. I’m not planning to discuss the embarrassing issue here — you can check the bug report if you’re interested — but rather on why I made new releases on three different branches. That’s quite unlike how we handle WebKitGTK+ updates! Distributions must always update to the very latest version of WebKitGTK+, as it is not practical to backport dozens of WebKit security fixes to older versions of WebKit. This is rarely a problem, because WebKitGTK+ has a strict policy to dictate when it’s acceptable to require new versions of runtime dependencies, designed to ensure roughly three years of WebKit updates without the need to upgrade any of its dependencies. But new major versions of Epiphany are usually incompatible with older releases of system libraries like GTK+, so it’s not practical or expected for distributions to update to new major versions.

    My current working policy is to support three stable branches at once: the latest stable release (currently Epiphany 3.22), the previous stable release (currently Epiphany 3.20), and an LTS branch defined by whatever’s currently in Ubuntu LTS and elementary OS (currently Epiphany 3.18). It was nice of elementary OS to make Epiphany its default web browser, and I would hardly want to make it difficult for its users to receive updates.

    Three branches can be annoying at times, and it’s a lot more than is typical for a GNOME application, but a web browser is not a typical application. For better or for worse, the majority of our users are going to be stuck on Epiphany 3.18 for a long time, and it would be a shame to leave them completely without updates. That said, the 3.18 and 3.20 branches are very stable and only getting bugfixes and occasional releases for the most serious issues. In contrast, I try to backport all significant bugfixes to the 3.22 branch and do a new release every month or thereabouts.

    So that’s why I just released another update for Epiphany 3.18, which was originally released in September 2015. Compare this to the long-term support policies of Chrome (which supports only the latest version of the browser, and only for six weeks) or Firefox (which provides nine months of support for an ESR release), and I think we compare quite favorably. (A stable WebKit series like 2.14 is only supported for six months, but that’s comparable to Firefox.) Not bad?

  • On Ignorance, Intolerance, and Bigotry

    It seems incredible that lawful permanent residents of the United States are stranded abroad, prohibited from boarding flights home, for such a capricious reason as being unfortunate enough to be traveling at the wrong time. (This is not even to mention the plight of millions of innocent refugees fleeing violence and terror, who are no less deserving of justice.) And yet, here we are.

    Who do you know who is affected by Friday’s executive order?

    One of my friends in college was of Iranian descent. Years ago, he joined the US army and risked his life fighting for our country in Iraq. Later, he visited his extended family in Iran, fearful that the government would imprison him if it discovered he had served in our army. Now he cannot go back, due to Iran’s entirely-justified reciprocal ban on Americans. When will he be able to see his family again? Will this really only last 90 days?

    Who do you know?

    I should not have had to detail my friend’s military service or present him as a sympathetic character. It should not matter. Equality is supposed to be one of the uniting principles of our country. We have a long history of failing in this regard, but it has mostly been a history of progress in the right direction. Clearly, that is no longer the case.

    So who do you know? If you do not know anyone affected by yesterday’s executive action, perhaps you should think twice before voting for ignorance, irrational fear, hate, and bigotry. Of course I mean that you should think twice before voting for the Republican Party. If you still, after this weekend, do not believe that is what the party now stands for, then you are long overdue for a reality check.

    The great irony of the just and tolerant society is that it must refuse to tolerate intolerance. At this, we have failed.

    I have never before today been so ashamed of my country. It’s not like we didn’t know this was coming. We have brought it on ourselves via a legitimate democratic election (of which, absurdly, only the winner contends was marred by massive fraud). Donald Trump campaigned on his Muslim ban, and he is only delivering as promised.

    Things are going to get much, much worse before they get better, but at least we have some reason for hope. The United States is fortunate in that it has a strong, independent judiciary. It is nothing short of amazing that lawyers representing victims detained at US airports have been able to win multiple injunctions barring their deportation in just one day. (If you’re not already a proud supporter of the ACLU like me, you should fix that right now.) That strong judiciary also protects our First Amendment rights (which do not, by the way, extend to my personal blog; hateful comments here will not be approved). As we enter the post-truth society where Republicans believe a separate set of “alternative facts,” it remains to be seen what all speech can still accomplish, but now is surely the time to find out. Do not remain silent. If you use social media or have a blog, you have a duty now to express your dissent. Do your part to move the needle of public opinion.

    You know, you don’t need to know anyone to see that this is wrong.

  • git commit –amend –date

    I accidentally committed something with git with the wrong timezone set in my VM. How to fix it? The help message for git commit says:

    --date <date>         override date for commit

    OK that’s great, but I don’t really want to figure out the input format for feeding in a date. I blindly tried:

    git commit --amend --date now

    And blindly typing “now” actually worked as intended. git is smart. Thanks git developers!

  • Epiphany Icon Refresh

    We have a nice new app icon for Epiphany 3.24, thanks to Jakub Steiner (Update: and also Lapo Calamandrei):

    new-icon
    Our new icon. Ignore the version numbers, it’s for 3.24.

    Wow pretty!

    The old icon was not actually specific to Epiphany, but was taken from the system, so it could be totally different depending on your icon theme. Here’s the icon currently used in GNOME, for comparison:

    old-icon
    The old icon, for comparison

    You can view the new icon it in its full 512×512 glory by navigating to about:web:

    big-icon
    It’s big (click for full size)

    (The old GNOME icon was a mere 256×256.)

    Thanks Jakub!

  • GNOME 3.22 core apps

    GNOME 3.22 is scheduled to be released today. Along with this release come brand new recommendations for distributions on which applications should be installed by default, and which applications should not. I’ve been steadily working on these since joining the release team earlier this year, and I’m quite pleased with the result.

    When a user installs a distribution and boots it for the first time, his or her first impression of the system will be influenced by the quality of the applications that are installed by default. Selecting the right set of default applications is critical to achieving a quality user experience. Installing redundant or overly technical applications by default can leave users confused and frustrated with the distribution. Historically, distributions have selected wildly different sets of default applications. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it’s clear that some distributions have done a much better job of this than others. For instance, a default install of Debian 8 with the GNOME desktop includes two different chess applications, GNOME Chess and XBoard. Debian fails here: these applications are redundant, for starters, and the later app looks like an ancient Windows 95 application that’s clearly out of place with the rest of the system. It’s pretty clear that nobody is auditing the set of default applications here, as I doubt anyone would have intentionally included Xboard; it turns out that XBoard gets pulled in by Recommends via an obscure chess engine that’s pulled in by another Recommends from GNOME Chess, so I presume this is just an accident that nobody has ever cared to fix. Debian is far from the only offender here; you can find similar issues in most distributions. This is the motivation for providing the new default app recommendations.

    Most distributions will probably ignore these, continue to select default apps on their own, and continue to do so badly. However, many distributions also strive to provide a pure, vanilla GNOME experience out-of-the-box. Such distributions are the target audience for the new default app guidelines. Fedora Workstation has already adopted them as the basis for selecting which apps will be present by default, and the result is a cleaner out-of-the-box experience.

    Update: I want to be clear that these guidelines are not appropriate for all distros. Most distros are not interested in providing a “pure GNOME experience.” Distros should judge for themselves if these guidelines are relevant to them.

    Classifications

    The canonical source of these classifications is maintained in JHBuild, but that’s not very readable, so I’ll list them out here. The guidelines are as follows:

    • Applications classified as core are intended to be installed by default. Distributions should only claim to provide a vanilla GNOME experience if all such applications are included out-of-the-box.
    • Applications classified as extra are NOT intended to be installed by default. Distributions should not claim to provide a vanilla GNOME experience if any such applications are included out-of-the-box.
    • Applications classified as Incubator are somewhere in between. Incubator is a classification for applications that are designed to be core apps, but which have not yet reached a high enough level of quality that we can move them to core and recommend they be installed by default. If you’re looking for somewhere to help out in GNOME, the apps marked Incubator would be good places to start.

    Core apps

    Distributions that want to provide a pure GNOME experience MUST include all of the following apps by default:

    • Archive Manager (File Roller)
    • Boxes
    • Calculator
    • Calendar
    • Characters (gnome-characters, not gucharmap)
    • Cheese
    • Clocks
    • Contacts
    • Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab)
    • Disks
    • Document Viewer (Evince)
    • Documents
    • Files (Nautilus)
    • Font Viewer
    • Help (Yelp)
    • Image Viewer (Eye of GNOME)
    • Logs (gnome-logs, not gnome-system-log)
    • Maps
    • Photos
    • Screenshot
    • Software
    • System Monitor
    • Terminal
    • Text Editor (gedit)
    • Videos (Totem)
    • Weather
    • Web (Epiphany)

    Notice that all core apps present generic names (though it’s somewhat debatable if Cheese qualifies as a generic name, I think it sounds better than alternatives like Photo Booth). They all also (more or less) follow the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

    The list of core apps is not set in stone. For example, if Photos or Documents eventually learn to provide good file previews, we wouldn’t need Image Viewer or Document Viewer anymore. And now that Files has native support for compressed archives (new in 3.22!), we may not need Archive Manager much longer.

    Currently, about half of these applications are arbitrarily marked as “system” applications in Software, and are impossible to remove. We’ve received complaints about this and are mostly agreed that it should be possible to remove all but the most critical core applications (e.g. allowing users to remove Software itself would clearly be problematic). Unfortunately this didn’t get fixed in time for GNOME 3.22, so we will need to work on improving this situation for GNOME 3.24.

    Incubator

    Distributions that want to provide a pure GNOME experience REALLY SHOULD NOT include any of the following apps by default:

    • Dictionary
    • Music
    • Notes (Bijiben)
    • Passwords and Keys (Seahorse)

    We think these apps are generally useful and should be in core; they’re just not good enough yet. Please help us improve them.

    These are not the only apps that we would like to include in core, but they are the only ones that both (a) actually exist and (b) have actual releases. Take a look at our designs for core apps if you’re interested in working on something new.

    Extra apps

    Distributions that want to provide a pure GNOME experience REALLY SHOULD NOT include any of the following apps by default:

    • Accerciser
    • Builder
    • dconf Editor
    • Devhelp
    • Empathy
    • Evolution
    • Hex Editor (ghex)
    • gitg
    • Glade
    • Multi Writer
    • Nemiver
    • Network Tools (gnome-nettool)
    • Polari
    • Sound Recorder
    • To Do
    • Tweak Tool
    • Vinagre

    Not listed are Shotwell, Rhythmbox, or other applications hosted on git.gnome.org that are not (or are no longer) part of official GNOME releases. These applications REALLY SHOULD NOT be included either.

    Note that the inclusion of applications in core versus extra is not a quality judgment: that’s what Incubator is for. Rather, we  classify apps as extra when we do not believe they would be beneficial to the out-of-the-box user experience. For instance, even though Evolution is (in my opinion) the highest-quality desktop mail client that exists today, it can be very difficult to configure, the user interface is large and unintuitive, and most users would probably be better served by webmail. Some applications listed here are special purpose tools that are probably not generally useful to the typical user (like Sound Recorder). Other applications, like Builder, are here because they are developer tools, and developer tools are inherently extremely confusing to nontechnical users. (Update: I originally used Polari instead of Builder as the developer tool example in the previous sentence. It was a bad example.)

    Games

    What about games? It’s OK to install a couple of the higher-quality GNOME games by default, but none are necessary, and it doesn’t make sense to include too many, since they vary in quality. For instance, Fedora Workstation does not include any games, but Ubuntu installs GNOME Mahjongg, GNOME Mines, and GNOME Sudoku. This is harmless, and it seems like a good list. I might add GNOME Chess, or perhaps GNOME Taquin. I’ve omitted games from the list of extra apps up above, as they’re not my focus here.

    Third party applications

    It’s OK to include a few third-party, non-GNOME applications by default, but they should be kept to a reasonable minimum. For example Fedora Workstation includes Firefox (instead of Epiphany), Problem Reporting (ABRT), SELinux Troubleshooter, Shotwell (instead of GNOME Photos), Rhythmbox, and LibreOffice Calc, Draw, Impress, and Writer. Note that LibreOffice Base is not included here, because it’s not reasonable to include a database management tool on systems designed for nontechnical users. The LibreOffice start center is also not included, because it’s not an application.

    Summing up

    Distributions, consider following our recommendations when deciding what should be installed by default. Other distributions should feel encouraged to use these classifications as the basis for downstream package groups. At the very least, distributions should audit their set of default applications and decide for themselves if they are appropriate. A few distributions have some horrendous technical stuff visible in the overview by default; Fedora Workstation shows it does not have to be this way.

  • Epiphany 3.22 (and a couple new stable releases too!)

    It’s that time of year again! A new major release of Epiphany is out now, representing another six months of incremental progress. That’s a fancy way of saying that not too much has changed (so how did this blog post get so long?). It’s not for lack of development effort, though. There’s actually lot of action in git master and on sidebranches right now, most of it thanks to my awesome Google Summer of Code students, Gabriel Ivascu and Iulian Radu. However, I decided that most of the exciting changes we’re working on would be deferred to Epiphany 3.24, to give them more time to mature and to ensure quality. And since this is a blog post about Epiphany 3.22, that means you’ll have to wait until next time if you want details about the return of the traditional address bar, the brand-new user interface for bookmarks, the new support for syncing data between Epiphany browsers on different computers with Firefox Sync, or Prism source code view, all features that are brewing for 3.24. This blog also does not cover the cool new stuff in WebKitGTK+ 2.14, like new support for copy/paste and accelerated compositing in Wayland.

    New stuff

    So, what’s new in 3.22?

    • A new Paste and Go context menu option in the address bar, implemented by Iulian. It’s so simple, but it’s also the greatest thing ever. Why did nobody implement this earlier?
    • A new Duplicate Tab context menu option on tabs, implemented by Gabriel. It’s not something I use myself, but it seems some folks who use it in other browsers were disappointed it was missing in Epiphany.
    • A new keyboard shortcuts dialog is available in the app menu, implemented by Gabriel.

    Gabriel also redesigned all the error pages. My favorite one is the new TLS error page, based on a mockup from Jakub Steiner:

    Web app improvements

    Pivoting to web apps, Daniel Aleksandersen turned his attention to the algorithm we use to pick a desktop icon for newly-created web apps. It was, to say the least, subpar; in Epiphany 3.20, it normally always fell back to using the website’s 16×16 favicon, which doesn’t look so great in a desktop environment where all app icons are expected to be at least 256×256. Epiphany 3.22 will try to pick better icons when websites make it possible. Read more on Daniel’s blog, which goes into detail on how to pick good web app icons.

    Also new is support for system-installed web apps. Previously, Epiphany could only handle web apps installed in home directories, which meant it was impossible to package a web app in an RPM or Debian package. That limitation has now been removed. (Update: I had forgotten that limitation was actually removed for GNOME 3.20, but the web apps only worked when running in GNOME and not in other desktops, so it wasn’t really usable. That’s fixed now in 3.22.) This was needed to support packaging Fedora Developer Portal, but of course it can be used to package up any website. It’s probably only interesting to distributions that ship Epiphany by default, though. (Epiphany is installed by default in Fedora Workstation as it’s needed by GNOME Software to run web apps, it’s just hidden from the shell overview unless you “install” it.) At least one media outlet has amusingly reported this as Epiphany attempting to compete generally with Electron, something I did write in a commit message, but which is only true in the specific case where you need to just show a website with absolutely no changes in the GNOME desktop. So if you were expecting to see Visual Studio running in Epiphany: haha, no.

    Shortcut woes

    On another note, I’m pleased to announce that we managed to accidentally stomp on both shortcuts for opening the GTK+ inspector this cycle, by mapping Duplicate Tab to Ctrl+Shift+D, and by adding a new Ctrl+Shift+I shortcut to open the WebKit web inspector (in addition to F12). Go team! We caught the problem with Ctrl+Shift+D and removed the shortcut in time for the release, so at least you can still use that to open the GTK+ inspector, but I didn’t notice the issue with the web inspector until it was too late, and Ctrl+Shift+I will no longer work as expected in GTK+ apps. Suggestions welcome for whether we should leave the clashing Ctrl+Shift+I shortcut or get rid of it. I am leaning towards removing it, because we normally match Epiphany behavior with GTK+, and only match other browsers when it doesn’t conflict with GTK+. That’s called desktop integration, and it’s worked well for us so far. But a case can be made for matching other browsers, too.

    Stable releases

    On top of Epiphany 3.22, I’ve also rolled new stable releases 3.20.4 and 3.18.8. I don’t normally blog about stable releases since they only include bugfixes and are usually boring, so why are these worth mentioning here? Two reasons. First, one of the fixes in these releases is quite significant: I discovered that a few important features were broken when multiple tabs share the same web process behind the scenes (a somewhat unusual condition): the load anyway button on the unacceptable TLS certificate error page, password storage with GNOME keyring, removing pages from the new tab overview, and deleting web applications. It was one subtle bug that was to blame for breaking all of those features in this odd corner case, which finally explains some difficult-to-reproduce complaints we’d been getting, so it’s good to put out that bug of the way. Of course, that’s also fixed in Epiphany 3.22, but new stable releases ensure users don’t need a full distribution upgrade to pick up a simple bugfix.

    Additionally, the new stable releases are compatible with WebKitGTK+ 2.14 (to be released later this week). The Epiphany 3.20.4 and 3.18.8 releases will intentionally no longer build with older versions of WebKitGTK+, as new WebKitGTK+ releases are important and all distributions must upgrade. But wait, if WebKitGTK+ is kept API and ABI stable in order to encourage distributions to release updates, then why is the new release incompatible with older versions of Epiphany? Well, in addition to stable API, there’s also an unstable DOM API that changes willy-nilly without any soname bumps; we don’t normally notice when it changes, since it’s autogenerated from web IDL files. Sounds terrible, right? In practice, no application has (to my knowledge) ever been affected by an unstable DOM API break before now, but that has changed with WebKitGTK+ 2.14, and an Epiphany update is required. Most applications don’t have to worry about this, though; the unstable API is totally undocumented and not available unless you #define a macro to make it visible, so applications that use it know to expect breakage. But unannounced ABI changes without soname bumps are obviously a big a problem for distributions, which is why we’re fixing this problem once and for all in WebKitGTK+ 2.16. Look out for a future blog post about that, probably from Carlos Garcia.

    elementary OS

    Lastly, I’m pleased to note that elementary OS Loki is out now. elementary is kinda (totally) competing with us GNOME folks, but it’s cool too, and the default browser has changed from Midori to Epiphany in this release due to unfixed security problems with Midori. They’ve shipped Epiphany 3.18.5, so if there are any elementary fans in the audience, it’s worth asking them to upgrade to 3.18.8. elementary does have some downstream patches to improve desktop integration with their OS — notably, they’ve jumped ahead of us in bringing back the traditional address bar — but desktop integration is kinda the whole point of Epiphany, so I can’t complain. Check it out! (But be sure to complain if they are not releasing WebKit security updates when advised to do so.)

  • A WebKit Update for Ubuntu

    I’m pleased to learn that Ubuntu has just updated WebKitGTK+ from 2.10.9 to 2.12.5 in Ubuntu 16.04. To my knowledge, this is the first time Ubuntu has released a major WebKit update. It includes fixes for 16 security vulnerabilities detailed in WSA-2016-0004 and WSA-2016-0005.

    This is really great. Of course, it would have been better if it didn’t take three and a half months to respond to WSA-2016-0004, and the week before WebKitGTK+ 2.12 becomes obsolete was not the greatest timing, but late security updates are much better than no security updates. It remains to be seen if Ubuntu will keep up with WebKit updates in the future, but I think I can tentatively stop complaining about Ubuntu for now. Debian is looking increasingly isolated in not offering WebKit security updates to its users.

    Thanks, Ubuntu!

  • Wayland by default in Fedora 25?

    I’ve noticed various reports that Fedora has decided to switch to Wayland by default in Fedora 25. It’s true that the alpha release will default to Wayland, but these reports have misunderstood an authorization from FESCo to proceed with the change as a final decision. This authorization corrects a bureaucratic mistake: FESCo previously authorized the change for Fedora 24, but the Workstation working group decided to defer the change to Fedora 25, then forgot to request authorization again for Fedora 25 as required. An objection was raised on the grounds that the proper change procedure was not followed, so to sidestep this objection we decided to request permission again from FESCo, which granted the request. Authorization to proceed with the change does not mean the decision to proceed has been made; the change could still be deferred, just as it was for Fedora 24.

    Wayland by default for Fedora 25 is certainly the goal, and based on the current quality of our Wayland desktop, there’s a very good chance it will be reached. I expect the call will be made very soon. Stay tuned.

  • On the killing of intltool

    If you have a project that uses intltool, you should be trying to get rid of it in favor of using AM_GNU_GETTEXT instead. Matthias wrote a nice post about this recently. Fortunately, it’s very easy to do. I decided to port gnome-chess during some downtime today, and ran into only one tough problem:

    make[1]: Entering directory '/home/mcatanzaro/.cache/jhbuild/build/gnome-chess/po'
    Makefile:253: *** target pattern contains no '%'. Stop.
    make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/mcatanzaro/.cache/jhbuild/build/gnome-chess/po'

    This was pretty inscrutable, but I eventually discovered the cause: I had forgotten to remove [encoding: UTF-8] from POTFILES.in. This line is an intltool thing and you have to remove it when porting, same as you need to remove the type hints from the file, or it will break the Makefile that gets generated. This is just a heads-up as it seems like an easy thing to forget, and since the error message provided by make is fairly useless.

    A couple unrelated notes:

    • If your project uses git.mk, as any Autotools project really should, you’ll have to modify that too.
    • Don’t forget to remove any workarounds added to POTFILES.skip to account for intltool’s incompatibility with modern Automake distcheck.
    • For some reason, msgfmt merges translations into XML files in reverse alphabetical order, the opposite of intltool, which seems strange and might be a bug, but is harmless.

    Say thanks to Daiki Ueno for his work maintaining gettext and enhancing it to make change practical, and to Javier Jardon for pushing this within GNOME and working to remove intltool from important GNOME modules.