Fedora Workstation Tasklist
This document aims to outline the tasks planned for the workstation as derived from the Workstation/Workstation_PRD and Workstation/Technical_Specification. Also some general information on how to get involved.
How to get involved
There are two good steps to take to get involved. First you should decide where you think you would want to get involved. Are you a Coder? Web developer? Tester? Designer? Marketing? The tables beneath show some of the tasks we are currently looking at. We would love your help with any of them. If you are interested in joining one of these efforts send an email to the desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org introducing yourself to the project. Follow that up with either contacting the people listed directly or contact one of the working group leaders, for instance through the Fedora Workstation IRC channel, who will help put you in touch. Some of these tasks will also require you to get involved with various upstream communities.
Older tasks
Previous task lists are maintained in this archive page.
Fedora Workstation 22
Software Installer - better app data | Ryan Lerch | Underway, looking at making part of Fedora packaging guidelines | The Application installer is the primary method for our users to find new software. Having good application installer metadata for all Fedora software meant to be installed with the software installer is thus crucial for our end user experience. https://fedorahosted.org/fpc/ticket/414 |
gnome-session gdbus port | Ray Strode | DONE | Preparation for systemd user sesssions |
Boxes - add a way to change vts | Zeeshan Ali | DONE (initial support done, may add more later) | https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=725303 |
Terminal -automatic title updates | Debarshi Ray | working patch posted | This feature will make working with a large quantity of terminals easier as identifying each one will be a lot easier. Feature parity with other OS's. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711060 |
Terminal - long-running job notification | Debarshi Ray | in progress discussing patches and design with upstream | Feature parity with other OS's. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711059, will copy the elementary OS approach |
Terminal - Better tiling | Debarshi Ray | upstream designers wary of tiling - exploring as a shell extension now | Another crucial feature for developers working with a lot of terminals. |
Wayland - input configuration protocol/library API | Peter Hutterer/Hans de Goede/Carlos Garnacho | mostly DONE here | Feature parity with X |
Wayland - input configuration UI | Rui Matos | in progress | feature parity with X |
Wayland - mixed HiDPI display support | Jonas Ådahl | We want perfect support for HiDPI displays with Wayland as going forward those are probably going to end up being the default displays on any new system. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=728902 | |
Wayland - mouse accessibilty | GNOME a11y team | Feature parity with X | |
Wayland - pointer barriers | Jonas Ådahl | DONE | Feature parity with X. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=706655 |
Wayland - Wacom support | Peter Hutterer, Carlos Garnacho | This is a crucial tool for animators and graphics artists wanting to use our platform. Working closely with Wacom on this. feature partity with X | |
Wayland - IBUS | Rui Matos | Wayland protocol needs defining, sync with Daiki Ueno from the IBus side | IBUS is the input system we rely in in Fedora for a large range of languages. We need IBUS support to be to notch in order not have switching to Wayland be a regression for our international userbase |
Wayland On-screen keyboard | Rui Matos | Not yet begun, needs to be synced with IBUS support. A protocol needs to be defined | Important for especially non-desktop use of Wayland |
Wayland pointer locking and confinement - protocol | Jonas Ådahl | in progress | needed for many games |
Wayland pointer locking and confinement - compositor implementations | Jonas Ådahl | in progress | needed for many games |
Wayland pointer locking and confinement - SDL support | Jonas Ådahl | in progress | needed for many games |
Use Wayland on the login screen | Ray Strode | in progress | gets us wider exposure without requiring a full session |
Make sure xorg-x11-drv-libinput is in the Workstation package set | Hans de Goede | Add a dependency in the fedora-workstation package, since we don't want to force it across board yet in xorg-x11-drivers | |
Fedora account integration | |||
Software Installer - Search in disabled repositories | Richard Hughes | Done | code blog post |
Software Installer - Codec installation | Kalev Lember | in progress | Move the gnome-packagekit session service for codec, mime handler, font, etc installation to gnome-software and drop our remaining gnome-packagekit dependency |
Software Installer - Fedora hosting + generation for app data | Fedora Rel. Engineering | q.v. https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/5721 | |
Software Installer - support developer tools | Allan Day | needs design | A lot of developer tools are command line and thus might not be a great fit for the application installer. Could be that for instance the Developer assistance is a better home for installing such tools. Or maybe a 3rd separate tool. |
Software Installer - Chrome/firefox webapps | Tomas Popela | A lot of desktop development these days actually come in the form of webapps. We need to integrate these apps into out platform so that they help drive people to our platform and not away from it. | |
Software Installer - Integrate distro upgrade | Richard Hughes | early design ideas here | gnome-software should inform the user when an upgrade of the OS is available, and offer to start it. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=712149 https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/6081 |
Chrome Apps integration | Tomas Popela | Need to discuss with Chrome guys upstream | |
Multimonitor - edge resistance | Florian Muellner | Florian has an unfinished patch | A lot of developers and sysadmins use multimonitor setups. We need to have best of class handling of these kind of setups. |
Docking station teardown behaviour | Design team/Jon McCann | design needed | A lot of developers, sysadmins and other power users use a docking station at the office and then bring their laptops home in the evening to continue working. Currently we don't have a great behaviour for dealing with the external monitor appearing/disappearing, with all apps just migrating to the internal screen on disconnect. |
Application grouping support | Design team/Jon McCann | design needed | Developers and devops are task oriented more than application oriented and we want to have a way to group a large set of application/windows together and be able to deal with them as a group. So that you can have for instance 5 terminals and a browser with 10 tabs set to specific pages associated with one project and another set of applications and terminals for another project. |
Design work for Developer Assistant | Allan Day | Initial discussions had with Dev.Exp. Team | The developer assistant is likely to become of our core value adds. Need to make sure it evolves in harmony with the rest of the developer experience we are providing and that features end up in the right place. |
Mylyn support added to Online accounts | Mylyn can be a portal for enabling developers easy access to a lot of developer resources | ||
Desktop log viewer - improve performance | David King | Investigate using a worker thread for journal interaction | |
Desktop log viewer - per-application logs | David King | unfinished patch exists | The desktop log viewer is meant to be a good debug tool for developers and a bit easier to interact with for such purposes than the log viewer included in cockpit. |
Desktop log viewer - hook up GLib logging to the journal | David King | ||
Desktop log viewer - move log-triggered actions (eg SMART, abrt) from gsd and abrt | David King | needs discussion with abrt team | |
Abrt - integrate with privacy settings |
Bastien Nocera, Abrt team | in progress | Use a privacy panel setting rather than gnome-abrt preferences, https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=742375, https://github.com/abrt/gnome-abrt/issues/74, http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2015-January/027006.html |
Abrt - improve crash collection | Bastien Nocera, Abrt team | https://github.com/abrt/abrt/milestones/Fedora%2022, https://github.com/abrt/abrt/issues/891, https://github.com/abrt/abrt/issues/887 | |
Abrt - improve desktop client | Bastien Nocera, Abrt team | https://github.com/abrt/gnome-abrt/issues | |
nautilus - port to GAction, complete the design refresh work | Carlos Soriano | in progress | Changes/Nautilus_Improvements |
nautilus - Google Drive support | Debarshi Ray | in progress | Will be implemented as a gvfs module, https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=739008 |
port libgdata to newer Google apis | Debarshi Ray | The api used in the Google Drive backend will stop working April 2015 | |
Firefox GTK3 port | Martin Stransky | Patches under review | Important migration to make sure Firefox can keep working as an integral part of the desktop |
Firefox screensaver inhibition | Martin Stransky | blocking on GTK3 port, patches under review | |
Evolution - composer webkit port | Tomas Popela | in progress | |
Chromium screensaver inhibition | Tomas Popela | waiting on completion of Evolution webkit port | |
caldav support for general IMAP connector in Online accounts | the generic IMAP connector should be suplemented by a general caldav one as most email servers using IMAP would be used with a caldav server | ||
Boxes - OVF/OVA import/export of vms | Zeeshan Ali | in progress | https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723008 |
Boxes - file transfers from/to vm | Zeeshan Ali | https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730259 | |
Boxes GPU passthrough | Zeeshan Ali | hardware shipped | Being able to assign a separate GPU to a virtual machine is a crucial feature for a lot of developers, for instance game developers and animators |
Eclipse port to GTK3 | Red Hat Tools team | in progress | We want this premier IDE to look and feel native on the desktop |
Qt - Adwaita theme | Martin Briza | in progress, built in rawhide. Still to do: make default | We want all applications to feel native and run well in the Workstation, regardless of if they are written using GTK, Qt, Java or something else. A developer should be able to choose the tools he or she wants without having to think about how their tools of choice have been implemented. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1176658 |
Qt - High Contrast theme | Martin Briza | Accessibility is important for us and should work without a hitch accross toolkits | |
Qt - ibus support | Martin Briza | verify | Support for various kinds of language input should also be transparent across toolkits
status: ibus works with Qt apps out of the box. You just need to install ibus-qt to have the popup right over the text you're writing - otherwise it's at the bottom of the window. |
Qt notifications | Martin Briza | verify | This may need work on the gnome-shell side too
status: Notifications do work - they're shown right. However, some Qt apps use tray status icons, which aren't shown anywhere - Clementine does this, for example. |
Qt application menu | Martin Briza | verify | status: Qt apps can export their menus via the com.canonical.dbusmenu interface. They export the complete menubar though so we should probably just utilize the first submenu or the complete menu in one button (it's possible, yet the menus are quite complex) |
Qt - CSD under wayland | Martin Briza | verify | status: Qt Wayland apps don't run in Rawhide at all. There is support for CSDs in QtWayland but there is no application utilizing it. Upstream KDE (Martin Graesslin) is strongly against using CSDs. |
Qt/KDE - ensure mouse and other input settings transfer accross when running Qt/KDE apps | verify | mbriza: Will test when the configuration dialog works in F22 GNOME. Anyway, since there are virtually no settings there, it will be fun. Also: regarding keyboard layout, GNOME doesn't use ibus-setup so it's not likely anything will be transferred. | |
eclipse-jbosstools integration? | talk to jboss team about linuxapps and their needs | ||
gnome-shell - new notification design | Florian Muellner | in progress, aiming to have implementation ready for design review before fosdem, with branches available earlier | here The message tray is a remaining weak spot of the original gnome-shell design Changes/GnomeShell_NewNotifications |
gnome-shell - system keybinding overview | https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/HelpOverlay#System_Shortcuts | ||
GTK+ - application keybinding overview | https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/HelpOverlay#System_Shortcuts | ||
liveusb-creator - visual refresh | Martin Briza/Jakub Steiner | Early design work here | This is the 'first point of contact' with Fedora - it should look polished and modern |
battery life monitoring | Owen Taylor | research underway | Put a system in place that allows us to evaluate power consumption under well-defined scenarios on an ongoing basis |
ambient backlight handling | research underway | Make sure we have ambient backlight drivers for important modules in the kernel, add support to gnome-settings-daemon. | |
power tunables | research underway | Some of the kernel tunables such as SATA link power management and USB autosuspend can make a difference of multiple watts. These need to be investigated and udev/kernel configuration adjusted as appropriate. |
Fedora Workstation 23
Project Name | Developer/Owner | Status | Justification |
---|---|---|---|
Optimus | Bastien Nocera | hardware shipped | Better support for Optimus systems are also important for a long range of power users and developers. Mode switch UI - https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=704387, https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734346 also relevant |
Terminal - Allow to search selected text on Web | Allan Day | Under discussion: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723088 | |
Terminal - Allow to send selected text to a pastebin | Allan Day | Under discussion: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723089 | |
Software Installer - user feedback | Richard Hughes | blocked on Fedora account integration | deferred until post |
Software Installer - Third-party repo (chrome, etc) | Currently blocked | ||
Software Installer - Offer a way to override 'metered' connection heuristics | The idea is for !NetworkManager to offer this information on a per-connection basis, then we can offer a user override for it in the network panel https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=741725 | ||
Software Installer - Install alternative desktops | Allan Day | little interest from KDE side | While the product aims at a strongly integrated vertical system we do want to allow those users who want it to install other options even if that means they lose out on a big part of the value proposition we are trying to bring to the table with the Workstation product. Need to take care to figure out how to do it in a way that is actually useful to users yet also not introducing risk of breaking core workstation experience through for instance library incompatibilities and similar. |
kdbus | Systemd team | Proposed on lkml, expected to get merged during winter, kernel-playground COPR has it | Important in order to have an efficient way to do data transport between containers. |
kbus glib support | David King | in progress | Needed to benefit from kdbus in the desktop |
Move apps to desktop file name == bus id | Part of the move to systemd user sessions, and isolated applications. Suitable for crowd sourcing | ||
Prefer D-Bus activation in gnome-session | Ray Strode | Part of the move to systemd user sessions | |
Make X launching code paths similar to Wayland in gdm | Ray Strode | Move towards socket activation for X and Wayland | |
Define 'portals' policy | David King | need to do some experimental prototyping | more than for server containers, desktop containers need to be able to access various system services, like online accounts. |
Desktop log viewer - add support for activate-by-message id to journal | David King | needs discussion with systemd guys | |
Desktop log viewer - clean up logs | suitable for crowdsourcing | ||
btrfs | Kernel team/Jon McCann | Design user interface for rollback feature - https://blogs.oracle.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs | The rollback feature that btrfs will give us can improve system robustness and upgrade pains significantly. btrfs has unfortunately taken a long time to mature, but hopefully with Facebook investing heavily in it, that will quickly change. |
Scriptless RPMS for desktop | None assigned | Good way for new community members to get involved. | We want to avoid requiring scripts to be called from RPMS as far as possible as any such manual steps increase the risk for bugs and issues happening during upgrades. Working on removing the need for such things will increase overall system robustness and make upgrades less of a challenge. It also makes our updates more alike to image based installations.
The rpm team is working on 'file triggers' that will enable this |
Virtual 3D for SPICE | David Arlie | Need more community involvement to move forward | |
Polari IRC client | Already somewhat done, need community involvement to take to production level | ||
improve git GUI tool | more like sourcetree? | Great tooling is a big part of the issue we need to address. Especially as we try to lure developers away from MacOS making sure our development tools like gitg are top notch is crucial. | |
Wayland - xsettings replacement for Wayland | not a short-term priority | If we ever want be be able to run the desktop without requiring some form of X Window support, then this needs to be resolved. | |
EGL | Work on Nvidia enabling technologies in the graphics stack (basically try to help move some of their proposal forward to help encourage their Wayland support quicker) | People like game developers, animation artists and similar require the binary Nvidia driver for their work, we need to work with NVidia to make sure it works really well with Wayland. | |
Screencasting with audio | Need community member involvement | We been getting requests for better screencasting support in the desktop, needs review of current status and what can be done to improve performance and features. | |
Fleet Commander | Alberto Ruiz | Proof of concept under development | We want our systems to be deployed in large software engineering organizations. Providing good tools for managing such deployments could be an important differentiator for us. |
Remote Windows Apps | Ondrej Holy and Debarshi Ray | GOA account handling for Windows terminal server and remote windows applications |