[MIR] libhandy

Bug #1815483 reported by Jeremy Bícha
12
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
libhandy (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Availability
============
Built for all supported architectures. In sync with Debian.

Rationale
=========
libhandy is an extension of GTK3 to allow for so-called responsive design or reactive layout. libhandy is developed by Purism which aims to produce a phone running a complete free software stack. Purism wants to enable a form of GNOME to run on the phone as an option (KDE Plasma and even Ubuntu Touch may be available later too).

Ubuntu 19.04's gnome-control-center 3.31.90 includes an embedded copy of libhandy. As we do with other libraries, it would be nice to transition to a shared library instead. The Ubuntu Desktop team believes it is reasonable to use the embedded copy for 19.04 so there isn't urgency for this MIR.

Besides gnome-control-center, the universe apps epiphany, gnome-contacts and gnome-games-app alse use libhandy. I expect more Ubuntu main apps will use libhandy in the future.

Security
========
No known security issues

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/libhandy
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libhandy/+cve

Quality assurance
=================
- Ubuntu Desktop bugs needs to be subscribed

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libhandy
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=libhandy
https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libhandy/issues

There is an autopkgtest passing on all architectures to test C compiling of a minimal libhandy app.

The upstream test suite is run during the build using dh_auto_test.

https://autopkgtest.ubuntu.com/packages/libh/libhandy
https://ci.debian.net/packages/libh/libhandy/

Dependencies
============
All dependencies for the library are in main.

We do not want the -dev package promoted to main because it depends on glade which the Ubuntu Desktop Team doesn't want to support in main at this time.

glade used to be in main until we allowed universe Build-Depends shortly before Ubuntu 16.04 LTS's release.

glade is old enough that it never had a MIR in Launchpad.

libhandy does provide a build option for the Glade catalog feature. It feels like it would be really useful to developers to have libhandy support in the Glade app (or in GNOME Builder which now offers Glade editing.) Glade is a GUI tool for building user interfaces for GTK apps (instead of needing to code them manually with XML or your favorite programming language).

Standards compliance
====================
4.1.3, debhelper compat 12, simple dh7 style rules

Maintenance
===========
Maintained in Debian by one of the Purism libhadny developers

https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/libhandy/tree/debian/sid
https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libhandy

Other Info
==========
At a recent GTK hackfest, moving some of libhandy's functionality into GTK4 was discussed. It's trickier to do that with GTK3 since GTK3 is supposed to be in stable mode since 2016.

https://blog.gtk.org/2019/02/08/report-from-the-gtk-hackfest-in-brussels/

The library is under heavy development:
https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libhandy/wikis/home

https://honk.sigxcpu.org/projects/libhandy/doc/

Related branches

Revision history for this message
Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer) wrote :

Doing the usual MIR checks I found most of them to be good:
- Duplication: it is actually deduplicating the embedded copies
- no lintian complains about packaging
- no functional bugs in Debian / Ubuntu yet (not used that much thou)
- Upstream is at and LGTM
- no embedded other libs
- no static linking
- d/rules and d/control are very clean
- meson build seems straight forward
- hardning=+all is in place
- runs (a few) build time self-tests
- you volunteered Ubuntu-Desktop as package subscriber
- no FTBFS currently nor in the recent history
- symbols are tracked for dh_makeshlibs
- packaging hs the most current release and updates ~monthly at least for now
- LD_LIBRARY_PATH only used in build
- no sudo (or similar) usage

Not perfect, but ok:
- autopkgtest only tests pkg-config and build against libhandy-dev
- yes it has no CVEs (yet), but it is too new to really know; a security evaluation is needed (probably ok thou since the siilar code is atm bundled in other packages in main)
- it has internationalization prepared (po/*) but only english so far
- usually a watch file would be nice but since upstream ~= Debian and doesn't release tarballs (but git tags) this doesn't really apply
- at least the -dev package depends on further universe packages e.g. libgladeui-2-6 do you intend (and ensure) to only pull libhandy-0.0 but no others to main?

Questions:
- the version number 0.0.7 is very unconvincing, does that mean it is still chaning API/ABI frequently - do you know if there is any major release planned that we should wait for?
- Debian bug 909075 holds it back from Debian and testing/integration there, should we wait until that is resolved (probably post buster) to move to it as well?
- (minor) build issue that could be resolved - do you want to contrib to Debian to even clean those?
  - "dpkg-gencontrol: warning: Depends field of package gir1.2-handy-0.0: substitution variable ${shlibs:Depends} used, but is not defined"
  - the docs might be incomplete "warning: no link for ..."

It will be nice to get the answers to the questions above resolved before completion, but IMHO we can already assign this to security for their review to appear on their queue.

[1]: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libhandy
[2]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=909075

Changed in libhandy (Ubuntu):
assignee: nobody → Ubuntu Security Team (ubuntu-security)
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)
description: updated
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :

I fixed the build issues you pointed out in Debian and Ubuntu now.

As I said, the Ubuntu Desktop team doesn't need this package in main for 19.04.

We have decided we don't want the -dev package in main because we don't want glade, so I have made sure it's excluded from the automatic inclusion of -dev packages:
https://git.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/+git/ubuntu/commit/?id=d2beb8

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libhandy/wikis/home suggests they will have their 0.1.0 first "stable" release next month alongside GNOME 3.32. It's hoped that the Librem 5 smartphone will being shipping soon after that.

Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :

*will begin shipping*

Revision history for this message
Eduardo Barretto (ebarretto) wrote :
Download full text (3.9 KiB)

I reviewed libhandy 0.0.10-1 as checked into eoan. This shouldn't be
considered a full audit but rather a quick gauge of maintainability.

libhandy is a library full of GTK widgets for mobile phones. The aim of
libhandy is to help with developing UI for mobile devices using GTK/GNOME.

- No CVE History:
- Build-Depends
  - debhelper-compat
  - dh-sequence-gir
  - gtk-doc-tools
  - libgirepository1.0-dev
  - libgladeui-dev
  - libglib2.0-doc
  - libgnome-desktop-3-dev
  - libgtk-3-doc
  - libgtk-3-dev
  - libxml2-utils
  - meson
  - pkg-config
  - valac
- No pre/post inst/rm scripts
- No init scripts
- No systemd units
- No dbus services
- No setuid binaries
- No binaries in PATH
- No sudo fragments
- No udev rules
- Unit tests / autopkgtests
  - under tests/ there are quite a few tests available testing different
    widgets
  - autopkgtests passing on:
    https://autopkgtest.ubuntu.com/packages/libh/libhandy
    https://ci.debian.net/packages/libh/libhandy/
- No cron jobs
- Build logs:
  - Some compiler warnings:
update-rc.d: warning: start and stop actions are no longer supported; falling back to defaults
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-action-row'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-arrows'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-combo-row'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-dialer'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-dialer-cycle-button'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-dialog'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-expander-row'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-header-bar'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-header-group'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-preferences-group'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-preferences-page'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-preferences-row'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-preferences-window'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-search-bar'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-squeezer'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-string-utf8'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-value-object'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-view-switcher'
WARNING: Use the 'pie' kwarg instead of passing '-fpie' manually to 'test-view-switcher-bar'
html/HdyViewSwitcher.html:135: warning: no link for: "PangoEllipsizeMode" -> (<span class="type">PangoEllipsizeMode</span>).
html/HdyViewSwitcher.html:543: warning: no link for: "PANGO-ELLIPSIZE-NONE:CAPS" -> (<code class="literal">PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_NONE</code>)

- No processes spawned
- Memory management
  - It looks safe
- No File IO
- No Logging
- No Environment variable usage
- No Use of privileged...

Read more...

Changed in libhandy (Ubuntu):
assignee: Ubuntu Security Team (ubuntu-security) → nobody
Revision history for this message
Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer) wrote :

Thanks for the check Eduardo, I'm actually not sure the Desktop Team still drives this oO.
All mid/high prio issues of the MIR review got adressed as well.
In terms of the process it seems this would be ok to be promoted, given that no commit is made to trigger the component mismatch per [1] the state for this until that is done is "in progress".

[1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MIRTeam#Process_states

Changed in libhandy (Ubuntu):
status: New → In Progress
Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

gnome-calendar is now depending on it so we are going to promote

Changed in libhandy (Ubuntu):
status: In Progress → Fix Committed
Revision history for this message
Matthias Klose (doko) wrote :

package subscriber is missing

Changed in libhandy (Ubuntu):
status: Fix Committed → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

desktop-package subscribed and package promotoed

Changed in libhandy (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → Fix Released
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