Tribblix Milestone 18

Time for another Tribblix release, this one following the sequence and called Milestone 18.

The list of changes is pretty dry. Let me add a little colour to that.

On the desktop, MATE has been updated to the current 1.14 release. This provoked a little investigation into desktop caches, because adding MATE broke things. (I've just now added another little change to my MATE packaging which should catch another problem. Sigh.) I also added the EDE desktop as another fast and light option.

I finally got around to building my own copy of libtiff (rather than the old binary version I had inherited from OpenIndiana). This involved a major version bump, and then rebuilding anything that depended on the old version. I created a compatibility package containing the old shared libraries as a stopgap, while working my way through the list. One of the applications that needed updating was gdk-pixbuf, and then there are applications that link against both gdk-pixbuf and libtiff directly.

Very little of the software I ship needs or wants GTK3, so I'm happy with GTK2 (which I did a minor update of). But at some point I'm going to have to update to GTK3. So I tried to update to a later version than I had, in accordance with the Tribblix philosophy of keeping current. Because I don't actually use GTK3 much, it was well behind. Unfortunately, getting completely up to date involved updating Cairo, Pango, GLib, ATK, D-Bus, returning ETOOMUCHWORK. I went to an intermediate step of version 3.14.15, which involved updating ATK. As part of that, I had to update D-Bus, another component I had previously inherited from OpenIndiana. As it's pretty foundational, that required some care and attention to detail, but after working out the appropriate tweaks to match how it had been built before, that went very smoothly. The Linux community (rightly) gets a lot of stick for not caring about compatibility, but I have been very pleased at how good binary compatibility has been with the various desktop components.

As I was going through the various version bumps, I realized that almost everything using LCMS now used lcms2, so I made sure that the one holdout, gimp, was forced to use lcms2 rather than the lcms1 that it picked by default.

It's not only the desktop. Tribblix isn't just a desktop distro, that's just rather more visible (and sometimes more fun). Some of the work here tends to follow a theme - for example on load balancers. Reading between the lines you might be able to detect that I've been working on antivirus (clamav and c-icap), there are other cases where I've used Tribblix to build, package, and test components that might be useful elsewhere


There are some isolated new packages that don't obviously make sense. Sometimes, I have to build and package prerequisites as part of building something else. For example, I had a look at pitivi. While building pitivi itself wasn't successful, I needed to get tools like meson and ninja and nose built, and components like pycairo. As I've gone to the effort of packaging, I'll keep them - they'll be useful in the future when I return to pitivi, and may well be useful for other tools. The same is true for snort, which is why libdnet and daq have been added, even though snort itself isn't there yet.

There was a mailing list thread on shells, which mentioned Plan9. So I went and added Plan9 from User Space because, well, I could, and it was an interesting opportunity to play with something different. I've also removed csh, it's now a link to tcsh. That wasn't a result of the thread, it was something I had meant to do for the last 2 releases but had forgotten in the build.

User feedback is always good. It tends to catch the cases I've never encountered myself. I've added an editor to the live environment, there's nano there now, if ever you need to edit any files.