Desktop Team Update - Monday 21st October 2019

[willcooke]

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.

Last week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Update - Monday 14th October 2019
Next week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates - Monday 28th October 2019

[vanvugt]

Gnome Shell:

• Honour CLUTTER_ACTOR_NO_LAYOUT more efficiently: Fixed conflicts, continued discussions.
• Landed upstream: clutter/actor: Remove color from the pick virtual function, also in gnome-shell.
• Landed upstream: clutter/stage: Do picking with float coordinates
• Tracked down a performance regression in upstream gnome-shell 3.35 (not in 19.10)
• compositor: Avoid blurry scaling if the scale factor is an integer: Redesigned. Fixed issues raised and resolved most discussions.
• Writing a detailed article (private) on performance work in Gnome Shell 3.34 for Ubuntu 19.10. Publishing this week.

Release bugs:

• fftw3 ftbfs in eoan (armhf only): eoan: Set up eoan on Raspberry Pi 3. I am now a Pi fan. Proposed a fix to Debian, awaiting review
• [nvidia] Corrupted wallpaper after resuming from suspend or hibernation:
  • eoan: Fix released in August.
  • disco: The proposed patch for disco is still awaiting review in Launchpad
  • bionic: Not reproducible on bionic with any driver version so far. There were also no bug reports from bionic systems. Waiting for someone to confirm, otherwise no bionic fix would be needed or verifiable.
• pulseaudio crashed with SIGABRT in pa_sink_input_assert_ref() from pa_sink_input_finish_move() from pa_sink_move_all_finish() from card_set_profile() from pa_card_set_profile: bionic: Minor changelog tweak reuploaded, thanks Seb. Now in bionic-proposed again.
• PulseAudio automatically switches to HDMI sound output on login: In progress upstream where they’re waiting on testing/feedback from mvo.

Backlog tracking

[marcustomlinson]

libreoffice

• Added PostgreSQL support to the LibreOffice snap.
• Fixed hybrid pdf crash in the LibreOffice snap.
• 6.2.8 SRU to Disco → Prepped and uploaded.
• Bug triaging - Dipped below 400 open bugs for the first time in at least 8 years!

GNOME build/plaform-snap

• Assisted @hellsworth with some gnome-3-34-1804-sdk build errors.
• Fixed harfbuzz pkconfig paths in gnome-3-32-1804-sdk.
• Began investigating core dump issues with gnome-3-32-1804 snaps.

other

• Eoan ISO testing.
• USN snap refreshes.

[didrocks]

Short week (3 days):

• A lot of iso testing and debugging (ZFS and non ZFS).
• ZFS blog post #2 publication: https://didrocks.fr/2019/10/11/ubuntu-zfs-support-in-19.10-zfs-on-root/.
• Handle ZFS feedback (discourse, twitter, emails…) with real bugs deciphering
• Prepared webinar about new desktop features

[kenvandine]

• Hyper-V image
  • Worked on 19.10 image, should be sending it to Microsoft this week
• GNOME build/plaform-snap
  • Helped some gnome-3-34-1804-sdk build issues
• Debugging reports of the drawing snap crashing, determined it’s common amongst snaps using gnome-3-32-1804 and handed it off to @marcustomlinson
• USN snap refreshes
• Reviewed and tested snapcraft and gnome-3-32-1804 PRs to handle snaps using gjs from the platform

[hellsworth]

Off Monday for a holiday but here’s what I spent the rest of the week on:

• Work on build snap:
  • Updated vala, gee, hafbuzz, bango, libsoup, gtk, gtksourceview, libdazzle, gnome-desktop, clutter-gtk, libpeas, pygobject
  • @kenvandine and @marcustomlinson helped troubleshoot some stinkers
  • Still stuck on librsvg
• XUbuntu ISO testing, found some issues:
  • Release Notes on first page of installer takes user to wrong page
  • Updates pulled on install anyways with checkbox unmarked
  • ubi-partman crashes if install updates unchecked and install third party software checked
  • (intermittent) need to authenticate 3 times before accepted
• LAS organization: making sure folks get their invitation letters, travel reimbursement communication, any other attendee assistance needed

[oSoMoN]

firefox

• created focal branches for firefox and firefox-beta
• prepared 70.0+build2 update
• fixed a typo in debian/README.Debian reported by Jean-Louis Dupond

thunderbird

• created a focal branch for thunderbird
• with upstream’s help, figured out a fix for the regression where external hunspell dictionaries were not being loaded, and uploaded to focal
• filed bug #1849162 to track the inclusion of lightning in the thunderbird package

chromium

• updated stable to 77.0.3865.120
• read and answered James’s questions on the discussion about exposing desktop files created by snaps to the DE
• confirmed and fixed bug #1848080 (missing --temp-profile option)
• confirmed and fixed bug #1848083 (core dump running chromium --help)
• wrote on the snapcraft forum to document the requirements to ship man and local man pages in a strictly confined snap
• tested whether the chromium-browser transitional package in eoan could be made “architecture: all”: the upgrade path works but on unsupported architectures (ppc64el and s390x) a new installation times out after 30min and fails − not a good user experience
• opened and closed the stable/ubuntu-20.04 channel, and invited Ken to collaborate on the snap
• updated beta to 78.0.3904.63
• updating dev to 79.0.3941.4 (there are Widevine changes that require reworking the patches)

libreoffice

• sponsored 1:6.2.8-0ubuntu0.19.04.1 for Marcus

snaps

• started discussion about broken D-Bus activation in snaps

[laney]

• Was in London for the week, in the Release Room Of Power
  • We broke the release trying to fix a bug, and then fixed it on release day - which is not ideal.
    • I’m not sure if racy is the right way to describe the problems that resulted or if we just broke some assumptions (deleting /etc/machine-id makes systemd assume that it’s running in first boot mode which might be relevant). It’d be good to understand exactly why things broke the way they did.
    • Also note that the zero-length machine ID (the initial state) is correct to have. We were working around some kind of kernel bug in the first place.
  • Did pair programming with xnox that resulted in a fix to ubiquity to fix some very specific breakage (packages with multiarch relationships on the ISO that weren’t completely satisfied on the ISO i.e. nvidia was missing its :i386 recommends)
    • That was belt and braces for a fix to debian-cd (and subsequent commits) to manually (!!! the real fix is in germinate and other places to support cross-arch relationships) pull in the needed i386 packages for nvidia onto the ISO.
• Helped out with archive opening - given that we got a name on time we could start opening pretty much immediately.
• autopkgtest:
  • Some massaging required today; the cloud was not very stable due to the massive load caused by the perl upload.
  • Worked a bit on the new staging environment. Required some firewall changes in the backend. One region is still broken but I’ve got a ticket with IS to get that fixed.

[till-kamppeter]

• Google Summer of Code 2019: Attended the Mentor Summit in Munich.Met with many other mentors and org admins, exchanged experience, presented OpenPrinting’s success with GSoC in a lightning talk and held a discussion session about the future work of OpenPrinting, received invitation to EuroBSDCon conference in Vienna in Sep 2020.
• Google Code-In 2019: Completed the mentoring org application, lined up sample tasks, proofreading.
• Catch up with e-mail after vacation and GSoC Mentor Summit
• cups-filters: Checked progress on debugging of cups-browsed for legacy IPP/CUPS printers (Upstream issues #124, #163, and #167).
• Bugs.

[3v1n0]

Most week in discussions for technical and design aspects at the GNOME Shell Hackfest, plus…

• Written reports and issues based on the hackfest results
• Review and proposed a change on Daniels’ mutter !575
• Opened various design issues, including Shell commands palette [issue]
• Shell search code cleanups [MR, merged]
• Merged the big boy refactor branch this.actor-removal [MR, merged]
• Shell refactor, use GLib.DateTime everywhere [MR]
• Merged mutter and shell changes to remove deprecated APIs [MR, merged]
• Merged mutter branch to avoid sending key-focus events to destroyed actors [MR, merged]
• Some work to improve the windows search to show designers

[seb128]

• One day off
• Joined the gnome-shell hackfest which was great!
• 19.10 ISO testing
• Update our gsettings override to drop the compromised sks server (following upstream gcr)
• Backported a fix from Robert for the background settings segfautling
• Sponsored again the pulseaudio/bionic SRU (with fixed changelog to remove extra bug reference)
• Debugged a bit a tracker segfault with upstream
• Reuploaded the unity-control-center version which was made to use their own schemas, that was supposed to have landed but the billeto copy failed without error
• Errors and launchpad bugs triaging, looked at the post release feedback online