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 Discourse.
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.
Fixed upstream, coming soon to eoan via mutter 3.34. I don’t plan on rushing any backports/patches before then because I want to ensure the “Fixed” status sticks on the development release first.
Reviewed gnome-3-32-1804 and compared to gnome-3-28-1804 in preparation for publishing to stable
Tested the snapcraft GNOME extension with a bunch of the GNOME snaps, all looks good and is merged now. I was able to remove as many as 39 lines of yaml in one of the snaps.
Mostly worked on updates for GNOME 3.34. The biggest blocker we have here is that Evolution Data Server has an API break, so we need to update all reverse dependencies of libecal-1.2 to use libecal-2.0 instead. This holds back GNOME Shell itself.
PR #7194 (packaging fixes for systemd user units) got another positive review, so is probably ready to land.
PR #7197 (exit on idle/peer credential checks) received a review that I need to address. Should be close to landing.
I’ve created draft PR #7238 that adds a service control interface. It still needs some work adding spread tests and getting agreement on the API.
snapd interfaces for the Snap Store:
PR #7042, implementing the appstream-metadata interface has been merged. We now have all the interfaces merged to support a .deb packages in a confined package management GUI.
snapd icon theme support:
PR #6767 has seen no movement. I’ll prod someone to see if anything else is needed to merge it.
Snapd desktop file IDs:
While looking at what is necessary to get desktop notifications working for confined applications, I ran up against the problems with desktop file naming for snapped applications. In this case, it turned out to be more than just an inconvenience, and actually blocks the implementation since GNOME’s new notification system is built on top of D-Bus activatable desktop files.
I put together a proposal for one way we could give apps limited control here:
While something like this is necessary for notifications to function, it isn’t sufficient: we will also require some xdg-desktop-portal changes to correctly determine the desktop file associated with a confined application (probably via a helper from snapd).
network-manager: More investigation on the logs of a reporter of the Bionic regression but no clue yet.
ippusbxd: Exchanged some ideas about the further development with David Valleau from Google (Chromium OS developer, main contributor), especially got confirmation that it works well on Canon, Epson, and HP printers. Got some ideas about how to get conventional (non-IPP) scanning to work while a multi-function printer is hooked up with ippusbxd.
HPLIP: Synced 3.19.6 from Debian because of FF next week.
CUPS: Uploaded 2.2.11 to Eoan because of FF next week.
Feature Freeze Eoan: First check-up what needs to get updated. OdyX, the Debian printing packager is on vacation, so there were no updates by auto-sync. Planned is Ghostscript 9.27, cups-filters 1.25.2 (I will release it upstream soon), foomatic-db, ModemManager.
Google Summer of Code 2019: Reviewed teh work on the Printer Application Snap framework and it looks great. Asked the student also to give the option to snap without Ghostscript, to save resources on Raster-only drivers like Gutenprint. He will include this.
Gnome Shell performance (
Release bugs:
libreoffice
thunderbird
chromium
libreoffice
other