[Enlightenment-announce] EFL 1.9 is Out

[Stefan S. <st...@da...>]

= EFL 1.9 is Out =

After three months of development work and only one day behind the set
schedule
we are proud to announce the release of version 1.9 of EFL,
Elementary, Evas
Generic Loaders and Emotion Generic Players.

== Download ==

http://download.enlightenment.org/rel/libs/efl/efl-1.9.0.tar.gz
fd4703edb56c01b713f92849fb15f6ca3d866227ce4abff2d90b08244cd99a99

http://download.enlightenment.org/rel/libs/elementary/elementary-1.9.0.tar.gz
95cb9ade6c1f135b673555d927d13b5e06986353047178125346abdf6c2b4d82

http://download.enlightenment.org/rel/libs/emotion_generic_players/emotion_generic_players-1.9.0.tar.gz
9447839047b087b0293b2ed6c453249919f66e5c4f62e252a7b7e4f996c2ac5f

http://download.enlightenment.org/rel/libs/evas_generic_loaders/evas_generic_loaders-1.9.0.tar.gz
d26546adf61db7521f9d46f2baedcb645af72497fc259e93907026970d42d794


----

= What's New =

Even if we had only three months a lot has happened during the 1.9
release cycle.
We only cover some highlights here for the full list please look at
the NEWS files
if you are interested in the details. As usual we have been working on
fixing bugs,
optimizing our code for speed and memory footprint and adding new
features.
Below we describe just some highlights and by no means provide a full
list.

== AT-SPI based accessibility features ==

New accessibility features based on AT-SPI2 interfaces enabling
Elementary support for AT-SPI clients (e.g. Orca Screen Reader).
AT-SPI support currently includes:
* registering an application,
* building an application's widget tree,
* implementations for the Accessible and Component AT-SPI interfaces.
For AT-SPI2 specification see
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/accessibility/atk/at-spi/at-spi_on_d-bus

== Evas Filters  ==
The Evas filters are a combination of filters used to apply specific
effects to an
Evas Object. For the moment, these effects are specific to the Text
Objects.

The filters can be applied to an object using a simple script language
specifically designed for these effects. Commands of these script
language
include blend, blur, grow, displace, transform and more. 

== Emotion Port to GStreamer 1.0 ==
A long due port from the GStreamer 0.10 API to 1.0 has happened in our
emotion library. This port implements some missing features, clean up
code a bit and fix some bugs on the way. Some highlighted changes:
* Use GstVideoInfo to store the format details inside the sink
* Add support for pixel-aspect-ratio
* Store video format information in GstVideoInfo for the different
* video streams
* Use GstAudioInfo to store the audio format information
* Implement initial support for GstNavigation interface
* Implement setting of audio/video channel

== Evas text improvements ==
A lot development time was spent on optimizing the evas text handling.
Speed as well as memory improvements combined with many bug fixes to
make the code more correct and handle corner cases. We also added
​support for 4bit and rel 4 bit compressed font glyphs as well as
the long awaited
font ​fallback for eet/edje and non-fontconfig queried fonts,
fixing international 
text in Terminology.

== Support for XPresent extension ==
Ecore_x gained support for the XPresent extension of X.org.
The upcoming Enlightenment 0.19 release will make first use of this.

== Edje Edit Enhancements ==
Another area with a lot of ongoing work was edje edit. From API
additions
over bug fixes and general improvements a lot was done here. Edje edit
can be seen as some foundation work for graphical edc/edj editors. It
is
needed to access and change the theme files. We hope to build upon
that
to provide better tooling for efl development later.  

== Statistics ==
During this release cycle efl received 783 commits with 598 files
changed, 33338 line insertions and 11352 line deletions. 

During this release cycle elementary received 576 commits with
637 files changed 29482 line insertions and 13469 line deletions.

==Changed Dependencies ==
* Emotion in efl now needs GStreamer 1.x (Evas generic loaders still
* need Gstreamer 0.10 - sorry for this we hope to fix that at some
* point)
* EFL now needs luajit by default. If you want to stay with lua 5.1 or
* 5.2 you can use --enable-lua-old during configure.

==Building and Dependencies==

If you have an existing EFL or Elementary install, you may wish to
delete its header files and libraries before compiling and installing
to avoid possible conflicts during compilation. If you are compiling
the above, please compile them in the following order:

efl
elementary
emotion_generic_players
evas_generic_loaders
Please refer to the respective README files in each release for a full
list of dependencies, explanations on configure flags and other
relevant information (Just scroll down to see the README already
displayed nicely).

EFL
Elementary
Emotion Generic Players
Evas Generic Loaders
Recommended dependencies are for all of the above are:

bullet
libpng
libjpeg
gstreamer (1.x) (ensure you have all the gstreamer codecs you
need/want. Evas generic loaders still need gstreamer 0.10)
zlib
luajit (optional lua 5.1 or 5.2)
libtiff
openssl
curl
dbus
libc
fontconfig
freetype2
fribidi
libpulse
libsndfile
libx11
libxau
libxcomposite
libxdamage
libxdmcp
libxext
libxfixes
libxinerama
libxrandr
libxrender
libxss
libxtst
libxcursor
libxp
libxi (2.2 or newer)
libgl (opengl/glx or opengl-es2/egl)
giflib
util-linux (limbount + libblkid)
systemd / libudev
harfbuzz
systemd
libwebp
vlc (libvlc)
poppler
libraw
libspectre
librsvg
It is suggested you add the following options when building EFL to get
a better experience:

--enable-xinput22 \
--enable-multisense \
--enable-systemd \
--enable-image-loader-webp \
--enable-harfbuzz
On linux to get framebuffer support you may want to also do:

--enable-fb
--disable-tslib
If you want wayland support also add:

--enable-wayland
At runtime if you want thumbnailing for DOC/PPT/XLS etc. files also
provide:

libreoffice