Desktop Team Update - Monday 8th July 2019

(Edit: note the new title, so that previews and searching make is easier to spot desktop and server team updates)

Hi everyone, below you will find the updates from the Desktop team from the last week.

If you’re interested in discussing a topic please start a thread in the Desktop area of the Community Hub (this site).
We also have our weekly meeting on IRC. We meet on Tuesday at 13:30 UTC in #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode. There will be an “Any Other Business” section at the end where you are welcome to raise topics. These topics might be discussed during the meeting, or afterwards depending on the time, depth of conversation, topic and so on.

Last week’s notes are here: Monday 1st July 2019
Next week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Update - Monday 15th July 2019

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libreoffice24-margin libreoffice

GNOME build-snap

  • A few more snaps building with the build-snap (albeit still somewhat uncleanly):
    • eog, gedit, and gnome-system-monitor.
  • Early profiling of build-snap snaps vs traditionally built snaps:
    • Mixed results, but can be up to 50% faster! (e.g. epiphany: 4s -> 2s).
    • Will do further testing once more snaps are building cleanly.

:computer_mouse: Gnome Shell performance (stutter | latency | CPU):

:bug: Release bugs:

:pick: Backlogs progress:

  • :chart_with_downwards_trend: Good news (falling backlogs): firefox, libreoffice, gdm3, thunderbird, chromium-browser, totem
  • :chart_with_upwards_trend: Bad news (consistently growing backlogs): nautilus
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  • Zsys:
    • Finished ZFS layer, see commits on https://github.com/ubuntu/zsys/commits/master :
      • promote, clone, destro, setproperty
      • Add optional semi-transactional support as some actions will spread over multiple ZFS commands
      • Add tests for each case above
      • Some cleanups, more properties detected…
    • Started working on the ZSYS/Machine layer (detecting and grouping machines from dataset)
    • Talked with the Fedora ZFS maintainer, interested in zsys/zfs support we bring
  • Misc:
    • Sponsored ubuntu-report bionic SRU
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  • internal: I created a blog post about the new position we have open on the team (backfill for @azzar1 :cry:) which is probably the closest I’ll ever come to going viral. It generated loads of interest and so I ended up spending a decent chunk of time responding to people.
    • Also reviewed quite a few of the applications and gave my recommendations. Thanks so much to anyone who replied and is reading this - we got some great candidates and I’m looking forward to speaking to many of you later on :slight_smile:
  • updated glib2.0 glib-networking in Debian and synced them
  • Fixed FauxPackage support in britney1 to support per-series FauxPackages. This was required to unblock gnome-shell in eoan.
  • Reviewed a libnotify MR for @3v1n0
  • SRUed GStreamer 1.14.5 to bionic
    • on the side, wrote an LP script to SRUify this kind of bug which is very tedious to do via the web UI, and snapped it.
      • this snap is suitable for other random scripts, so please contribute if you have anything lying around that might help others
  • Made some small improvements to the rls tracking script
  • Helped diagnose + fix some stuck archive jobs after a brief network outage
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firefox24 firefox

  • preparing firefox 68.0 update, due out tomorrow
  • source tarballs had increased by 41MB between 67.0 and 68.0, updated the exclusion patterns in the tarball creation script to regain most of this loss
  • 68.0+build1 published to eoan, with new firefox-geckodriver package and with autopkgtests

chromium22 chromium

  • continued investigating kopano-webapp autopkgtests failure triggered by the migration to the chromium snap and published a snap update with a patched chromedriver that fixes the issue
  • tested portals for access to external files in chromium snap
    • there are a few pieces missing, and some code to write upstream for this to work
    • filed crbug #981309 to request comments from upstream

libreoffice24-margin libreoffice

  • sponsored Marcus’s upload of 6.2.5 to eoan

snapcraft24 snaps

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  • network-manager: Some improvements and discussion on the merge request for the autopkgtest script.
  • network-manager: Got an answer about the Bionic SRU regression from the network-manager mailing list Reporter has errors in his config file, waiting for another answer from him.
  • cups-filters: Released 1.25.1 upstream with a lot of bug fixes on the filters, especially the fix of a crash in pdftoraster which caused CUPS to fail to build.
  • Google Summer of Code 2019: Continued mentoring the students working on the Printer Application snap framework and The Common Print Dialog Backends support for the GTK-3.0 print dialog.
  • Bugs.
  • Eoan
    • debian syncs (gthumb, libgphoto2, yelp)
    • updated bolt to the new 0.8 version, enabled the new installed tests and used them for autopkg
    • tested the indicator-keyboard build fix for new vala but the source still fails to build on a gnome-desktop error
  • SRU
  • Other
    • read the usbguard MIR review feedback, talked a bit to GNOME upstream about the status of the work on their side (they would welcome some user testing, I will try to set up a ppa), send a patch to Debian to add a .symbols and reported some build warnings
    • versions report hacking
      • added warning for outdated daily ISO
      • listed ‘other useful reports’ at the bottom of the page
      • some fixing in upstream components urls/versions
    • Trello board reviews
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snapd interfaces for snap-store:

  • The appstream-metadata interface (PR #7042) has been reviewed. There is some concern about the number of new mounts and whether it is likely to interfere with layout use by snaps that plug it. Given the limited use for this interface, hopefully it won’t be considered a blocker.
  • The packagekit-control interface (PR #70564) is currently sitting in draft status but has had some initial review. The included spread test relies on a new snap that can’t be built in the CI environment, and is currently stuck in the store review queue. The test involves a snapped version of the pkcon command line utility talking to the real packagekitd, so should hopefully also give us some indication of the cross platform compatibility. One concern is that the interface’s AppArmor rules are broader than would be ideal: since PackageKit transactions have no recognisable prefix to their object path, I’m effectively granting read only property access to everything on the system bus. The interface defaults to not autoconnecting though, so the damage is limited.

snapd session agent:

  • I’ve updated PR #6954 based on review feedback, so hopefully we can get this part merged this week.

Other branches:

  • I submitted PR #7073 this week, which adjusts the AppArmor rules for the opengl interface. This was based on some experiments with shipping the open source OpenGL stack inside a custom base snap: while the libraries were readable/mmapable, access to some of the configuration files necessary to locate the correct GL/Vulkan backends were blocked. Allowing access to those paths is effectively a no-op for snaps running against core/core18, so I don’t expect much controversy over this change.

Chromium snap:

  • I chatted with @oSoMoN about what would be needed to get the Chromium snap using xdg-desktop-portal for its file choosers. The main requirement was to switch to the newer GtkFilechooserNative API, which allows the in-process dialog to be replaced with the out of process dialog provided by xdg-desktop-portal. It looks like the main pain points would be (a) converting the use of custom filters to equivalent glob filters, and (b) update code assuming the file chooser is a GtkWindow: namely the code setting its parent to an aura::Window.
  • Olivier filed a bug report to get upstream feedback, and I offered to provide him any help he needs.
  • If this change is accepted, it will likely have the knock-on effect of making it easier to add portal support to all the Electron apps on the store.
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  • USN refreshes… and more coming today
  • snap-store snapped, should go in a track this week

Release bugs:

  • 1750069 bionic VCS for the seed has been updated, need to upload the meta package

GNOME World:

  • Fixed crash happening when closing the display with windows animating [MR, merged, and backported]
  • Wrote test case for Hanging Java dialogs and fixed it [MR, merged and cherry-picked]
  • Fixed regression crash on mutter key-grabs handling [MR, merged]
  • Reviews (including daniel’s !600)

Packaging stuff

  • Prepared patch to fix crashes on 3.32.2+git [MR, to reiterate]
  • Prepared fixes for 3.28.4 regressions [MR, please sponsor]
  • Updated SRU bugs

RLS-:bug:'s

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