Hi everyone, below you will find updates from the Desktop team’s Distro squad from the last week. If you’re interested in discussing a topic please start a thread in the Desktop area of Discourse.
Hi, sorry I haven’t posted here in a while. It’s been a busy month. Here are some recent highlights:
GNOME 45 RC is now in Ubuntu 23.10. Most of it is also migrating to Debian Testing within the next few days. A major exception is GNOME Shell 45 and friends.
I uploaded GNOME Shell 45 to Debian Experimental today
In late August, we landed GNOME Shell 44 in Debian Testing. By now, basically all the packaged Shell extensions were updated to be compatible. That will not be the case when we push GNOME Shell 45 to Testing. I expect most will need to be temporarily removed, but maybe someone reading this is interested in helping port those extensions to 45.
I packaged a git snapshot of the Simple Scan app. The app was ported to GTK4 and libadwaita but there hasn’t been any upstream release yet. Simple Scan is unusual: I believe it’s the only packaged GNOME Core app that isn’t maintained by the Debian GNOME team so I have no ability to update the package in Debian (some other libraries and services aren’t maintained by the team either.)
Updated the GNOME Feeds .deb package. This was blocked for a few months waiting for Debian NEW review for a new dependency.
Updated the GNOME Metronome .deb for Ubuntu 23.10. This can’t be uploaded to Debian until rust-libadwaita is available there.
I sponsored an upload of rust-libadwaita-sys to Debian Experimental. The Debian maintainer converted the package to regenerate its gobject-introspection bindings using gir-rust-code-generator and Debian packages, which means our packaging now satisfies Debian ftpmaster concerns. The maintainer also did this work for all the other Rust GTK related -sys packages for Debian Experimental. This work and rust-libadwaita should reach Debian Unstable in a few weeks after rustc 1.70 is available there. This unlocks the ability to package a large number of GNOME related apps for Debian and Ubuntu.
I’ve also been sponsoring his NEW uploads packaging lots of Rust dependencies needed for Loupe, GNOME 45’s new default image viewer.
I cherry-picked/rebased a patch for Ubuntu’s inkscape package to fix the build tests after changes in default fonts. I need to forward it to Debian too.
I filed Feature Freeze exceptions for gjs and tecla
Got libpeas2 to build on mips64el (needed for the GNOME Builder 45 app to reach Debian Testing) after I realized that the upstream developer is hard-coding -Werror=def in the meson build file. I was able to workaround that in debian/rules to avoid needing to carry a patch that may need to be rebased in the future. I didn’t report this issue to the upstream maintainer because of how obscure it was (only affected one Debian architecture), but maybe there was a Python bug here with the missing definition.
Worked around a ppc64el build issue for the highway library (a build-dependency of the jpeg-xl library) and reported it upstream.