Monday 20th May 2019

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 13th May 2019

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

:computer_mouse: Gnome Shell other work:

:beetle: Release bugs:

:pick: Backlogs progress:

  • :chart_with_downwards_trend: Good news (falling backlogs): xorg, libreoffice, totem
  • :chart_with_upwards_trend: Bad news (consistently growing backlogs): none
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  • Sprinting 3 days
  • Added safe graphics mode to ISO legacy boot menu. This allows to start a graphical session and install Ubuntu on machines with a graphics card not well supported by default drivers available on the installation media. For example nVidia chipset with nouveau. This is available on latest build of Eoan.
  • Seeded nvidia drivers on image’s pool (Bug1826844) . This allows to install proprietary drivers even without a network connection.
  • Upgrade tests maintenance.
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libreoffice24-margin libreoffice

snapcraft24 GNOME build-snap

  • Updated gnome-calculator’s own snapcraft.yaml to build from gnome sources instead of packages.
  • Started on fixes required to get the now sources-built gnome-calculator running without error.
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firefox24 firefox

  • preparing 67.0+build2 update

thunderbird24 thunderbird

  • preparing 60.7.0+build1 update

chromium22 chromium

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  • cups-filters: Released 1.22.6 upstream: Bug fix release, including all fixes which were in the GIT up to now, plus fix for grayscale PostScript jobs to be actually printed in grayscale.
  • cups-filters: Investigated bugs in the support of MuPDF as PDF renderer and fixed them, fixed also some code inefficiencies of the 2016 GSoC project of MuPDF support. All this I discovered when applying the grayscale PostScript output fix.
  • cups-filters: Released 1.23.0 upstream adding support for the “print-scaling” IPP option (allows overriding A4/Letter mismatches, printing photos to completely fill the page, …) and adding the fixes on MuPDF support. This release is already uploaded to Debian experimental and synced to Eoan.
  • cups-filters: Merged 2018 GSoC project pull request of improving cups-browsed: Treating native IPP network printers and remote CUPS queues equal so that any combination of queues can be clustered; No PPD download from remote CUPS queue to support deprecation of PPDs by CUPS upstream; Auto-selection of printer in cluster based on user’s option settings and job content. This is now tested and some fixes get applied and will soon be released as upstream version 1.24.0.
  • Google Summer of Code 2019: Started mentoring the students.
  • Bugs.
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  • HR reviews
  • Various roadmap sprint meetings/discussions
  • Created an xdg-data-dirs override script useful in some snaps, used by sticking it in the command-chain
  • Reviewed desktop snaps automated test result output and found an issue with the tests not properly changing the destkop theme in xenial. This has been fixed now. We’re also looking at putting the test output online somewhere rather than sending it via email to make it more publicly useful.
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  • Joined the Canonical planning week in Lyon
  • HR reviews continued
  • Fixed a typo in gnome-initial-setup
  • got the gupnp/gssdp soname change transition done
  • removed old geoclue and ubuntu-geoip from Eoan (needed to stop building the deprecated n-m libs)
  • desktop updates (e-d-s, evolution)
  • backported an upstream evolution commit to use theme sound for notification (instead of beep) by default
  • reviewed our n-m distro changes, found a merge error on the way
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  • Support snapd configuration API in snapd-glib.
  • Add missing Qt interface attribute API.
  • LightDM 1.30.0 release.
  • Worked on snapd-glib markdown API.

GNOME World

  • Continued refactory on this.actor-removal branch, just few actors are missing now
  • Merged ScrollFadeView introspection (fixing key-navigation on various items) [MR]
  • Got some numbers and discussed a bit fix for shell theme memory hog [MR]
  • Code cleanup to use g_(s)list_free_full more in mutter [MR, merged]
  • Fixed a double-free on clutter tests [MR]
  • Forced mutter CI to use MALLOC_CHECK_ env var when testing [MR, merged]
  • Some fixes to g_clear_signal_handler branch [about to be merged, MR]
  • Improvements to PopupMenu as actors merge proposal [MR]
  • Refactory on mutter to use GSlice more, but probably to be dropped [MR]
  • Memory fixes in mutter-clutter and mutter-cogl, making tests to work when using stricter memory checks (G_SLICE=always-malloc) [MR]
  • Use fibidi by default to get pango text infos that are now deprecated in pango itself [MR, merged]
  • Various upstream reviews, helped with merging Daniel’s fix.
  • Joined the State of the Shell talk at GUADEC

Distro work

  • Prepared mutter 3.32.2 for debian [MR, please sponsor]
  • Prepared gnome-shell 3.32.2 for debian [MR, please sponsor]
  • Prepared mutter 3.28.5 pristine-tar and upstream/3.28.x for debian [MR, please sponsor]
  • Prepared gnome-shell 3.28.4 pristine-tar and upstream/3.28.x for debian [MR, please sponsor]
  • Bionic SRU for 3.28.4 [mutter MR, shell MR - please sponsor]
  • Verified Disco SRU bugs

rls-:bug:'s

  • Committed fixes for disco are just waiting release team to push to updates
  • In progress bugs for disco have a merge-proposal with cherry-picks since some time, but at this point I guess we release them as part of 3.32.2
  • Bionic bugs are waiting for release team to ACK the SRU that is in queue (although I might rebase that on 3.28.4)
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  • Joined the Canonical planning week in Lyon
  • Review some nvidia seed changes
  • Worked on Zfs test for bootlist (step 1)
  • Spend some time looking at mount syscall vs mount command line to create mock environment for Zfs tests (mounting from a file).

snapd:

  • One of the blockers for accepting support for background user session services was an inability to control such services over package install/upgrade/removal. While we brainstormed ways to handle this, nothing has happened on the snapd team’s side. I plan to help out on this task, and started by writing up what had previously been discussed in the following forum thread: a user session agent for snapd.
  • I’ve done some preliminary experimentation based on the above, but need to coordinate with zyga and pedronis before committing too much time.

GUADEC:

  • submitted a talk proposal to the CFP
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