#197 XML Parsing

April 25, 2025 • 8 News • Curated by Felix

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 18 to April 25.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Owen Chiaventone has done some useful profile-guided optimisation of XML parsing in gnome-software (which happens every time repository metadata is updated), and found a few improvements to make; https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/issues/941#note_2417546

Glycin ↗

Sandboxed and extendable image loading and editing.

Sophie 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ (she/her) reports

More progress on our quest to move away from GdkPixbuf. Glycin now provides a thumbnailer that can be used to create thumbnails for all image formats for which glycin loaders are installed. This is already resulting in more supported image formats, correct support of color profiles, better support for image that have a higher bit depth than 8-bit, better support for Exif orientations, and memory safe implementation for most of the formats. You can see a comparison for some images with a before (left) and after with glycin thumbnailer (right) on the screenshot below.

This is not properly implemented for GNOME OS yet, but we are on it.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

ashpd ↗

Rust wrapper around freedesktop portals.

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

I have released a new version of ASHPD Demo, the app for testing portals. The release adds support of the USB and Global Shortcut portals contributed with STF support.

Third Party Projects

xjuan says

I am happy to announce a new Cambalache release! Version 0.96.0 – GResource Release!

Add GResource support

Add internal children support

New project format

Save directly to .ui files

Show directory structure in navigation

Add Notification system (version, messages and polls)

Unified import dialog for all file types

Update widget catalogs to SDK 48 Read more about it at https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/2025/04/20/cambalache-0-96-released/

sunniva announces

After a long period of inactivity, Stockpile 0.5.0 has been released. This release brings the application to the GNOME 48 runtime, as well as improving user experience with a new start screen and the ability to recover corrupted data. See more information about this release on Flathub!

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi says

Pipeline version 2.2.0 until 2.2.2 were released this week. Starting from this version, Pipeline will now use all Piped instances configured in the settings in parallel to query the feed. This leads to a massive speedup for querying your feed when you have multiple instances configured (for my subscription list, this was a 7x speedup). Along this line, the Piped instance list is now managed by Pipeline automatically, which downloads a list of working instances on every startup. This should lead to a more reliable experience, and does not require manually finding working instances anymore. A bug was also fixed, where different videos replaced each other in the watch later list when they were uploaded at approximately the same time.

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi announces

Flare version 0.16.0 was released. This release adds initial support for receiving stickers.

Miscellaneous

Philip Withnall reports

Maximiliano added support for storing your GitLab token in libsecret when you use gitlab-changelog to write NEWS entries for a release, https://gitlab.gnome.org/pwithnall/gitlab-changelog/-/merge_requests/22

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

This Week in GNOME