Re: BlueZ 5 (was: Re: Blocker bug review ahead of freeze)

[Gustavo Padovan <gustavo padovan collabora co uk>]

Hi,

2013-08-16 Kalev Lember <kalevlember gmail com>:

> Hi Dominique,
>
> Bastien Nocera, who's been leading the GNOME effort to switch to BlueZ 5
> is currently on vacation. I don't know all the details but I'll try to
> reply with what I know.
>
> I'll add Gustavo Padovan to CC as well if he wants to add anything.
>
> In Fedora, we've decided to bite the bullet and switch to BlueZ 5, as of
> three days ago. This is planned for the F20 release that's due in November.
>
> I've personally been aware of the plan for GNOME to switch to BlueZ 5 in
> 3.10 for a while. But that's maybe because I do distro packaging and
> follow release notes :)
>
> gnome-bluetooth 3.9.3 that switched to BlueZ 5 and dropped BlueZ 4
> support was released back in June,
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/ftp-release-list/2013-June/msg00095.html .
>
> Several other GNOME related modules switched to BlueZ 5 at the same
> time: gnome-control-center and gnome-shell. The switch might not have
> been obvious though because things kept _building_ fine. We use BlueZ
> through DBus, so the new gnome-bluetooth / gnome-shell /
> gnome-control-center releases would only want BlueZ 5 at _runtime_.
>
> I sent a summary report about this to fedora-devel ML yesterday, and it
> covers some other DE issues as well if you are interested,
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-August/187738.html
>
> Basically we have:
>
>  ported:
>    gnome-bluetooth
>    gnome-shell
>    gnome-control-center
>
>  ported, but no release yet:
>    pulseaudio (support in git, release supposed to come in September)
>    NetworkManager (patches currently in bugzilla)
>
>  not getting ported for 3.10:
>    gnome-user-share

The GNOME move to BlueZ 5 brought some issues with it, but I see it as
necessary. BlueZ 4 is obsolete from a upstream point of view. It's been more
than a year that no bugfixes is pushed to it. Also it doesn't support any of
new fancy features.

The issues I see are:

* No HSP support(for VoIP calls) as of now. BMW was working on implementation
for this but it is not upstream. The first proposal was rejected. 

* No support to enable/disable sharing of files over FTP. In Obexd it is
always on by default and there is no way to disable it on runtime. To be
honest quite few people use this profile these days, new phones doesn't
support FTP.

* No support to enable/disable receive of files through OPP. This affects
basically fast user-switching and screen lock where we would like to disable
OPP for that user. Two small patches, one in BlueZ, one in gnome-user-share
can fix this. Personally I would I would remove the enable/disable option
from the Sharing panel and have it always enabled.

* NetworkManager: have only PAN support is completely fine for me, DUN is not
supported by most of the new phones out there. The Bluetooth SIG will
deprecate DUN at some point in the future.

On the other hand we get support for many new features:

* Bluetooth Low Energy devices (aka Bluetooth Smart), eg: the new bluetooth 
medical and fitness devices out there.
* Message Access Profile, see evolution working with it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htXLG47qvL4
* Phone Book Access Profile
* Better Bluetooth Audio Support
* Better Bluetooth core handling

        Gustavo