Changes/Bluez5

Migrate to Bluez 5

Summary

Fedora currently ships with Bluez version 4. In Fedora 20, we are going to switch to Bluez 5.

Owner

• Name: Bastien Nocera, Kalev Lember
• Email: bnocera@redhat.com, kalevlember@gmail.com
• Release notes owner:

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 20
• Last updated: 2013-07-02
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

In Fedora 20, we'll be using BlueZ 5.x to manage Bluetooth devices.

Bluez5 uses a D-Bus API that's not compatible with Bluez4 and as such, management applications and a number of libraries and daemons will need to be ported.

LWN introduction to BlueZ 5: http://lwn.net/Articles/531133/

BlueZ 5 porting guide: http://www.bluez.org/bluez-5-api-introduction-and-porting-guide/

Benefit to Fedora

This keeps the Bluetooth stack in Fedora up to date. Bluez 4 is no longer maintained upstream; switching to Bluez 5 ensures we can get all the latest upstream bug fixes and enhancements.

Scope

• Proposal owners:

For GNOME 3.10 (due September 2013), Gustavo Padovan and Bastien Nocera are going to be porting gnome-bluetooth, NetworkManager and PulseAudio to BlueZ 5.

• Other developers:

Bluez4 and Bluez5 are not parallel-installable, and incompatible, so other applications relying on Bluez4 will need to be ported by their respective maintainers.

• Release engineering:

No release engineering coordination required.

• Policies and guidelines:

No changes needed in the packaging guidelines.

Upgrade/compatibility impact

BlueZ ships a daemon and provides two main interfaces for applications to use it:

libbluetooth shared library

The library ABI hasn't changed and the soname in 5.x is still the same as was in 4.x: libbluetooth.so.3, so the impact should be minimal. Everything should be able to continue working without needing even a simple rebuild.

org.bluez D-Bus API

Not all packages that use the org.bluez D-Bus service have a dependency on the bluez package. This makes it hard to find all the consumers; there's probably a number of applications that use bluez via D-Bus without requiring it as a dependency if the functionality isn't the main one, so there's likely going to be other impacted packages.

• blueman (Status: needs porting to BlueZ 5)
• gnome-bluetooth (Status: ported)
• libbluedevil (Status: port available in a git branch, https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/108912/)
• NetworkManager (Status: in progress)
• pulseaudio (Status: in progress)
• obex-data-server (Status: obsoleted and not ported to BlueZ 5)
• gvfs-obexftp (Status: won't be ported)

How To Test

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

User Experience

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Dependencies

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: (What to do? Who will do it?) N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Contingency deadline: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Blocks release? N/A (not a System Wide Change), Yes/No

Documentation

N/A (not a System Wide Change)