Mir 1.4.0 Release

We’re pleased to announce the release of Mir 1.4.0.

For Ubuntu, Mir is available from the Mir PPAs. It is also available as a source tarball.

Wayland layer-shell

This release is mostly about supporting Mir based shells using Sway’s layer-shell extension protocol. @wmww has been using this for his work with MATE Wayland.

The mirclient API support

We’ve been saying for some time that we will be dropping support for clients using the mirclient API in favour of Wayland. In practice, support for clients using the mirclient API has remained unchanged for the last two years.

Because of these warnings downstream projects have mostly dropped support for the mirclient API. The notable exception being UBports and their Ubuntu Touch phone.

So far we’ve kept the existing code intact but not extended it for new work. In particular, we have not implemented support for mirclient API on EGLstream and are not planning to support it for other graphics platforms. (UBports are supporting it themselves for their phone based graphics platform.)

We’ve now taken the first step towards removing this support: Mir now defaults (at runtime) to not providing mirclient API support. It can still be enabled on the command line --enable-mirclient , in the environment MIR_SERVER_ENABLE_MIRCLIENT=foo , or in the .config file enable-mirclient= .

As part of this change we’ve updated the scripts used in our examples so that these no longer depend on the mir-socket used by this library. (Except on Xenial where gtk-mir and qtubuntu-desktop are the default.)

Changelog

ABI summary:

mirserver ABI bumped to 50

## #Enhancements:

## [MirAL] Support for exclusive zones

[Wayland] Many Layer Shell improvements

[mirclient] Make the mirclient socket optional and disabled by default

[mir-utils] Delete mirrun and mirbacklight

[mir-demos] Replace using miral-wayland in the scripts with a name of the form wayland-[0-9]

Bugs fixed: