Desktop Team Update - Monday 2nd September 2019

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 26th August 2019
Next week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Update - Monday 9th September 2019

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  • On holidays this week so only few work days there
  • GUADEC BOF day and travelled back
  • Eoan
    • helped with the GNOME landing/transition, disabled some libsoup buggy tests to fix the build
    • Updates: poppler, mpg123, libxslt, e-d-s, pixman
    • looked at proposed migration/autopkgtest issues, resolved some
    • did rebuilds for the poppler soname change
    • synced some other updates from Debian
    • fixed the libmbim, webrtc-audio-processing and switcheroo-control builds
    • backported a fix from Simon/Debian to fix the gcr tests and unblocked the update
    • looked a bit at the failing uim autopkgtest, uploaded a depends change to see if it helps
    • demote gstreamer1.0-libav to a rygel Suggests
  • SRU
    • backported a cogl/i386 build/test hang fix to disco
  • Other
    • trello board updates
    • report a pulseaudio/bluetooth segfault upstream
    • reviewed the eoan launchpad translations template queue and approved some so they get imported
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:computer_mouse: Gnome Shell performance (stutter | latency | CPU):

:wrench: Other:

:beetle: Release bugs:

:chart_with_downwards_trend: Backlogs progress

  • gnome-shell spiked a little this week, of which 40% is randomness and 60% is the introduction of 3.33 in eoan.
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  • CUPS/cpdb-libs: Needed a lot of time to find the cause of the autopkg test failure but finally found out what happened. The CUPS libraries is not setting the global default values for local CUPS server, port, domain socket file, … Reported an appropriate upstream bug and applied a workaround to cpdb-backend-cups. Released cpdb-backend-cups 1.1.1 and uploaded it to Eoan to get the autopkgtest of cpdb-libs working again. Reported 3 more CUPS upstream issues while working on this.
  • cups-filters: Released 1.25.4 upstream and synced from Debian into Eoan. Contains the page geometry fixes from last week.
  • ghostscript: Backported my page geometry fixes from last week from upstream into the Eoan package.
  • network-manager: Backported upstream patch to not prefer FT-PSK when it is only supported by supplicant but not by the Wi-Fi interface or driver (Merge Proposal).
  • Google Summer of Code 2019: Final Evaluations are completed. From 5 students for OpenPrinting 4 have passed.
  • Bugs.
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  • Travelled back from GUADEC, had a couple of days off
  • Helped fix a bug I made happen in the Unity session by removing gnome-session.service, sorry about that.
  • Fixed ISO image builds for Ubuntu after snapd got more strict.
  • Fixed volume sliders in Settings, waiting for review

I was attending the GUADEC BOF days and flying home for most of last week. Here are a few of the relevant outcomes from that:

  • The Flatpak folks would like to migrate the o.f.p.Flatpak.Spawn portal to xdg-desktop-portal and have it support both Flatpak and Snap confinement. This is an API intended to let confined apps more strictly confine subprocesses. The reason for a special portal API for this is that the system calls needed to implement privilege separation/confinement are generally blocked by confinement systems. I’ve brought this up with Zygmunt, and it looks like it would be non-trivial to support at present. Further investigation is needed.
  • At the GTK BOF and afterwards, I worked on glib MR !1067, which would let g_app_info_launch_uri() automatically register files with the document portal when launching snap apps. I want to get some xdg-desktop-portal improvements merged before pushing to get it merged though: namely not proxying files the snap should already have access to.
  • There was some discussion about improving snapd support in xdg-desktop-portal. We need this to properly support the notifications portal API, but it would also make the snap support functional on distros not supporting AppArmor confinement. I started a forum thread outlining exactly what I think needs to change on the snapd side to support the portal service changes.

snapd session agent support:

  • I received another review on PR #7197 during GUADEC. There were some data races showing up in the test suite. These turned out to be in the tests rather than the underlying code, so I’ve fixed those issues.
  • PR #7238 (adding systemd control API to session agent) still needs some work. There was a question of whether the “fallback to kill if stop times out” code is actually needed, or if systemd does this itself automatically. I’d copied this logic from the handling of system services, but if it isn’t needed that would simplify things.
  • I’m still working on the session agent client PR. I hope to have it up for review shortly.

snapd icon theme support:

  • Now that snapd 2.41 is out, I hope to see this PR merged. It is waiting on a final review from Zygmunt, so hopefully it will be merged this week.
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  • ZSYS:
    • discussed and answered questions on the MIR + discussion during the MIR meeting.
    • got one more fix in upstream go-libzfs merged. Switched to that branch pinning that commit.
    • uploaded ZSYS 0.1.1 with various enhancements, bug fixes and adressing some packaging comments from the MIR.
    • discussed/review/explore code on how to integrate zfs default installation in ubiquity with jibel.
    • look at useradd, append a patch to hook to zsys if this one is installed.
    • work on zsys to add datasets dynamically for each user, support Create() in ZFS layer + tests. Still in progress.
    • some code reorganisation to support useradd additional command.
  • Misc:
    • AA work
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