Mir 0.28 Arrives As A Late Addition To Ubuntu 17.10

There's one week to go until the official Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" release and it looks like Mir 0.28 will land in the nick of time.

Not that Mir is playing a pivotal role in Ubuntu 17.10 now that the transition has occurred to GNOME Shell and Wayland for this release, the new Mir release should make it into the archive. Mir 1.0 was expected up until yesterday when it was announced Mir 1.0 would be released as Mir 0.28.

The Mir 0.28 release was tagged yesterday and it's now been accepted into artful-proposed. From communications last month back when it was known as Mir 1.0, they were pursuing a feature freeze exception.

Notable to Mir 0.28 is the rudimentary support for Wayland clients as well as a relicensing of the code. Besides more than one dozen bug fixes, the official release notes mention the new features/enhancements as:

- Update licences to (L)GPL3 or (L)GPL2.
- Initial support for Wayland clients
- [mir_demo_client_display_config] add orientation changing
- RPC: Don't require the server ACK client's buffer-release requests.
- Added libmirclientcpp to Mir source package
- Added libmiral to Mir source package
- Various small improvements to miral-shell example
- [libmiral, miral-shell] handle display reconfiguration better and allow shells to customize maximized placements.
- Enable CommandLineOptions to be processed before server initialization

Moving forward, the only "big" use-case I've heard of for Mir besides any existing Canonical IoT applications is MATE possibly exploring Mir for use with Wayland. It will be interesting to see if Mir 1.0 happens for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or if they continue with the 0.xx releases.