Package: release.debian.org
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: mut...@packages.debian.org
Control: affects -1 + src:mutter
User: release.debian....@packages.debian.org
Usertags: unblock
I would like this to be considered for Debian 13.0 if possible, but if
we're too late for that, it can be deferred to 13.1 by converting this
request into a trixie-pu request.
[ Reason ]
New upstream bugfix release.
[ Impact ]
Contains various targeted bug fixes. In this particular release, most of
them are for crashes. In Debian, these crashes mainly impact
gnome-shell, in which they would normally (when using Wayland) be
immediately fatal to the desktop session, causing data loss.
Another notable change in this release is that visual alerts ("visual
bell") are now rate-limited to 2 per second. I'm told this is required
by the European Accessibility Act for products sold in the EU, because
the default implementation of visual alerts is to flash the entire
screen, which can trigger photosensitive seizures if done rapidly and
repeatedly.
[ Tests ]
I'm using the proposed version on my laptop. A functionally equivalent
version was in experimental for 10 days without regressions reported.
I've confirmed that the visual-bell rate limiting works.
mutter has build-time tests and an autopkgtest, which can't cover
everything for GUI software but are better than nothing.
[ Risks ]
This is a core component of our default desktop environment.
A Wayland compositor or X11 compositing manager is a complicated thing
and regressions are possible, but the upstream project is generally good
about judging risks and fixing regressions promptly. We have updated
mutter in stable point releases in the past.
The changes are all narrowly-targeted and seem proportionate to the
issues being fixed.
The only packaging changes on the Debian side are switching between
branches, to accommodate GNOME 49 development having begun.
The test suite has been somewhat flaky in the past (with spurious
failures that require a retry). The most recent release in trixie seems
to have addressed the most common cause of this, but I did see some test
failures on ppc64el, which were only observed once and disappeared when
retried. I think they are all race conditions in the test infrastructure
rather than serious problems with mutter itself (two in mutter's test
suite and one in python3-dbusmock) and I've reported them at important
severity. I expect them all to be difficult to reproduce.
[ Checklist ]
[x] all changes are documented in the d/changelog
[x] I reviewed all changes and I approve them
[x] attach debdiff against the package in testing
unblock mutter/48.4-2
