(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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.