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.
After further discussion, the decision was made to change how things are divided: keep the theme engines in the new snap, but put the theme data files in gtk-common-themes. The majority of the themes we’re distributing ship both versions together, so this simplifies the build and ensures we get a consistent snapshot of the two themes. The gtk-common-themes part of this move is here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Ubuntu/gtk-common-themes/merge_requests/7
Yaru with old GTK 3:
GTK 3.20 made some changes that broke the visual appearance of various themes. The Yaru theme was designed with post-3.20 systems in mind, so doesn’t display well for apps running against old GTK. Unfortunately Ubuntu 16.04 shipped with GTK 3.18, so there are a number of snap apps that end up looking bad with Yaru.
On first look at the Yaru source, it looked like it was an overlay on the Adwaita theme and would be pretty easy to backport. I was mistaken here though: it instead modifies the Adwaita SASS code.
I’ve started to look at how to apply those changes to the 3.18 SASS.
Short summary this week, with the release of Cosmic Cuttlefish next week on Thursday 18th, main focus is image testing, image testing and image testing …
GDM issue spinning 100% CPU on GNOME Shella after login, will try the current proposed fix for another issue to see if there is an impact (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdm/issues/429)
the security team published the 62.0.3 update I had prepared to bionic, xenial and trusty
got beta branch (63) building on cosmic, Rico is helping with bionic and xenial
informed foundations team that firefox 64 requires rust 1.29 and cargo 0.30 to build
chromium
it turns out the override-pull workaround suggested by Sergio doesn’t fix the chromium snap build issue on !amd64, I’ve resumed investigation
looking into theming issues with the snap, I found that the snap isn’t looking for the current theme’s gtk.css under $SNAP/data-dir/themes, I’m digging further
moved patches and args.gn to a separate part that gets copied to the stage dir, to avoid the use of relative paths that escape the current part’s directory (Sergio said this was likely to break in a not-too-distant future with containerized builds)
Got gjs uploaded to switch over to mozjs60, helped prepare the list of removals required because it no longer builds on s390x
Some follow up due diligence work from that was required: uploaded a couple of things to build-depend on gjs/libgjs-dev so that they don’t build uninstallable binaries.
Helped with a bit of gdm debugging / upstream reviewing; there’s an ongoing investigation into an issue where the greeter doesn’t start for some people. I haven’t reproduced that myself yet but I’ve ordered some hardware that will hopefully let me…
Tested a network-manager fix for some common crashes we were seeing in cosmic & uploaded 1.12.4-1ubuntu1 containing it.
Packaged gstreamer 1.14.4, uploaded & in the queue, will sync the rest once these bits are accepted.
Merged gnome-setting-daemon 3.30.1.2. Notably this turns off the suspend-to-hibernate feature which has proved to be quite buggy in its current implementation.
bos02 (a cloud testing region that runs ppc64el, arm64 and s390x tests for us) was quite unreliable this week - I’ve spent some time working with IS on those problems and if you notice those arches lagging on Launchpad / autopkgtest, this is probably why.
forwarded remaining delta to bubblewrap pkg, it’s back in sync now
OpenPrinting: Started coordinating the renovation of the web site with former GSoC students who are volunteering here.
hplip: Fixed three annoying bugs, especially LP: #1789184 an rls-cc-incoming bug which prevented the hp-toolbox from starting, LP: #1745383 which makes HP’s GUI apps crash on any message box, confirmation, … Both show bad testing of the upstream code on HP’s side.
cups-filters: Release of 1.21.3 containing latest fooamtic-rip fix.
cups-filters: PCLm bug turned out to not actually be a problem.
cups-browsed: Weekly meeting with this year’s GSoC student to complete printer-auto-selection-by-job-properties project.
Bugs.
One annoying point:
Avahi seems to be completely unmaintained upstream. A year ago I have posted a patch for localhost support and I still did not get an answer about it. It is urgently needed to get IPP over USB (and in the future printer applications, the replacement for printer drivers) to work in a standards-conforming way. Debian is blocking on the patch due to missing upstream acceptance. Also Avahi is an essential part of the OS. Any volunteers?
sponsored nautilus fixes to cosmic & bionic for Marco
updated gnome-disk-utility (Debian & cosmic)
Archive work
reviewed the cosmic translations queue, quite some templates were blocked waiting for approval there
tried to sort out launchpad/translation setup issues for those new packages& others (sharing with upstream seems enabled by default which creates issues, especially when launchpad has outdated imports)
some archive admin work (helped with mozjs/gjs transitions, promoted xdg portals)
Bug fixes
backport a gtk segfault fix and updated the package to use dh_translations/fixed outdated translations on launchpad
Other
discussed with gnome-online-accounts upstream a report from a Xenial user they got after deleting their old deprecated google API key (the change was in GNOME 3.20 which is post xenial, they decided to restore the key, ) https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-online-accounts/issues/25
helped reviewing the team plans for next cycle
did some daily iso testing (live session/custom install/tested the default install, looked for translations issues)