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.
Several days debugging a mutter crash related to monitor sleep modes in Wayland, apparently triggered by a recent performance fix combined with a less recent performance fix. While Ubuntu doesn’t consider Wayland a priority, fixing this is a priority for us because that recent performance fix affects Xorg too, and is probably the most important one in mutter 3.34. It’s a priority for us to ensure that doesn’t get reverted.
Fixed upstream, coming soon to eoan via mutter 3.34. Once it is there and working properly I will reassess 3.32 and 3.28, which may require slightly different or additional fixes.
While here I worked on that a bit more, and we published the silo, so 3.33 is on its way to eoan now. There are some issues to work out in eoan-proposed, so it might be a little while yet before it gets to regular users and ISO images. Don’t be tempted to enable eoan-proposed to get it. Doing that is a very bad idea and you are likely to (deservedly) get little sympathy if you have done so.
many “hallway track” conversations with other GNOME devs.
I mentioned to Alex the problems I’d run into with the desktop notifications API of xdg-desktop-portal with snaps. This is mostly down to assumptions about package IDs being synonymous with desktop IDs. The fix is to provide xdg-desktop-portal with more information about snap applications, which I’ll be working on at some point.
I started work on a simple patch for GLib to have g_app_info_launch automatically export files via the document portal when it detects it has a desktop file belonging to a snap application. I created glib MR !1067, which is currently work in progress.
foundations updated rustc to 1.36 and cargo to 0.37, and as a follow-up I filed bug #1841191 for broken firefox/thunderbird builds on eoan
started investigating whether firefox can be built without gcc, and at least on xenial (with clang 6.0) the answer is yes
spent some time trying to reproduce frequent autopkgtest failures on eoan/armhf, unsuccessfully
thunderbird
continued work on the next major update, 68.0 (expected beginning of September)
chromium
Laney reported that the chromium snap doesn’t start under Wayland with GNOME 3.33, I confirmed and filed a bug to track the issue, and submitted an interface update which got merged in snapd
updating stable to 76.0.3809.132
updated beta to 77.0.3865.42
updated dev to 78.0.3887.7
other
attended the main conference days of GUADEC in Thessaloniki, Greece
looked into updating seahorse to 3.32.2 in debian, but the tag is missing upstream
CUPS: 2.3.0 is finally out! And the licensing resolved! With more than one year or 3 Feature Freezes of delay it appeared on Fri, August 23, the day after our Eoan Feature Freeze. The license solution is that the Apache 2.0 license gets an exception added which allows linking with (L)GPL software, so cups-filters and other software using the CUPS library does not need any license change. See also bug 1841295.
cups-filters: Fixed a small bug in the sample PPDs so that the autopkg tests of CUPS 2.2.12 do not fail, released upstream version 1.25.3 for this, packaged for Debian and Ubuntu.
foomatic-db: Re-established auto-generation of daily snapshots on the upstream server, synced current version from Debian for Eoan.
Google Summer of Code 2019: Final evaluations of the students by the mentors. The two students who I have mentored have done great work and I have let them pass the final evaluations. Most probably the other 3 students for OpenPrinting will also pass.