Decoder 0.2.0 Released ?

It has been a few months since last release in February, and quite a lot has changed, GTK 4 had many issues back then and had to be manually included in the Flatpak manifest, libadwaita was still a WIP merge request for libhandy and didn’t include changes to the Adwaita stylesheet, ASHPD didn’t have an asynchronous API, and gtk4-rs was in a state of constant flux, to the point where making the required API changes when updating the app took hours, just due to the massive number of improvements in gtk-rs-core. Just updating those dependencies makes a big difference.

The worst offender was that the gstreamer plugging used for the camera depended on gstreamer/gst-plugins-good/!767 for GTK 4 support, and to make everything bad, a bug in the Intel drivers made the app crash in Wayland when initializing the camera so it had to be released without Wayland support.

On a brighter note, Bilal introduced support for the camera portal in ASHPD and made a small widget demo, this allows to drop those pesky holes in the sandbox by taking advantage of PipeWire. As far as I am aware this is the first real-world use of the camera portal, and by implementing it in Decoder, and soon in Authenticator, these of the first apps (if not the first) to use it ?. By using this we can drop the patch, stop building gstreamer and most of its modules, add back Wayland support, and drop the sandbox hole.

The plan now is to wait a few days for translations and release a 0.2.1 minor release, add support for creating more types of QR codes (I am waiting for libadwaita/!194), and incorporate this camera widget into Authenticator, and Bilal is working on releasing the Demo for ASHPD ?.

You can get Decoder at Flathub. Source at gitlab.gnome.org/World/decoder.