Desktop Team Update - Monday 9th 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 - Desktop Team Update - Monday 2nd September 2019
Next week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Update - Monday 16th September 2019

5 Likes
  • USN refreshes
  • Updated gtk-3-test snap to use the gnome-3-28 extension in snapcraft, this will be used for snapcraft PR testing going forward.
  • Worked on the 18.04 and 19.04 Hyper-V images, both are now working for me but only 18.04 is working for @willcooke, still investigating
3 Likes
  • cups-filters: Released 1.25.5 upstream with the latest bug fixes, especially a fix on cups-browsed which caused a fatal error when starting it after it has shut down uncleanly.
  • cups: Uploaded 2.2.12-2ubuntu1 with upstream fix for launch-on-demand not working with systemd (especially CUPS does not restart when changing configuration with cupsctl).
  • OpenPrinting: Monthly phone meeting and monthly OpenPrinting News, the news also contain links to the work products of the 5 GSoC students.
  • Linux Plumber’s Conference 2019 in Lisbon: The schedules are published! Attending the conference from Mon, Sep 9 to Wed, Sep 11, with OpenPrinting mini conference on Tue, Sep 10 in the morning. Going to Lisbon on Sun, Sep 8 and returning on Thu, Sep 12.
  • Bugs.
3 Likes

:computer_mouse: Gnome Shell performance (stutter | latency | CPU):

:wrench: Other:

:beetle: Release bugs:

:chart_with_downwards_trend: Backlogs progress

  • FYI, upstream Xorg has just disabled atomic modesetting by default. I’m not sure if eoan will get the change but I expect it will avoid flickering on some systems and kernel errors mentioning “atomic”, which we do see semi-regularly in bug reports. Those bugs usually get sent to the kernel but it sounds like the problem in some cases was Xorg using atomic incorrectly.
5 Likes

Shorter week - had family matters to attend to.

libreoffice24-margin libreoffice

  • Resolved some component mismatches:
    • epiphany-browser <- libreoffice-help-zh-cn
    • fonts-dzongkha <- libreoffice-l10n-dz
    • fonts-hosny-thabit <- libreoffice-l10n-ar
  • More bug backlog cleanup:
    • Loads of bug watches added for upstream issues.
  • USN refreshes.
3 Likes
  • Adding zfs support to ubiquity
3 Likes
  • ZSYS:
    • Handle userdata creation and rename + tests (https://github.com/ubuntu/zsys/commits/master)
    • Hook it up to shadow (useradd, usermod)
    • Opened a FFe for this.
    • Worked with jibel on ubiquity to integrate ZSYS on custom page. We fought as much as we could with partman (trying to revert “custom” choices), but has to revert to have it in the ask page instead.
    • Small PR review on zsys.
  • Misc:
    • Customer proposal sync up meeting
4 Likes
  • holidays, only back for one day
  • post holidays catch-up
  • some Debian syncs (at-spi-atk, libxkbcommon, pyatspi, libinput, vl4-utils, at-spi-core, libevdev, libical3; orc, upower )
  • backported an upstream change to disable gstreamer-vaapi on amd driver since it’s buggy
  • some updates (duplicity, gnome-disk-utility, libjpeg-turbos)
  • some merges (webkit2gtk)
  • sponsored vala-0.46 to Debian/experimental
1 Like

GNOME/fdo World

  • Lots of changes on Shell’s this.actor-removal refactor, we eventually decided to split and land it earlier 3.36 cycle though.
  • Prepared a shell cleanups (and some random fixes) branch [MR, merged]
  • Debugged a an issue during actors destruction causing locks on shell, prepared mutter’s fix [MR]
  • Ported Shell to use GDateTime on calendar
  • Improved shell logging system [MR]
  • Debugged gnome shell initialization to figure out what was causing lags and stuttering in startup in my setup.
    • Turns out to be Network Manager client async init not to be really async [issue and test case]…
    • Fixed this by porting NM client to use GTask and threads to init objects [MR]
    • Turns out that is not enough, and still the shell is slow in building the UI. Here’s the time analisys.
  • Proposed a smarter GTypeName computation on GTypes created by gjs [MR]
  • Wrote tests and proposed the fix prepared at GUADEC with Philip to improve gjs cheks on GObject classes [MR]
  • Helped debugging snapd issue causing it to be spinning at 100% after auto-refresh
  • Prepared a fix for a critical error on mutter in X11 [MR, need to reiterate]
  • Upstream reviews

Distro

  • Review on the unity settings changes
  • Looking at bug #1841794
3 Likes
  • Quite a few Debian updates and syncs
  • Followed up on mutter/i386 failing to build
  • Helped with cheese causing other packages to fail to build due to it growing a dependency on gstreamer-bad
  • A bit of followup on an XSS vulnerability we had in autopkgtest’s web request script
  • Fixed volume slider regression in gnome-control-center
  • Reviewed some contributions from Endless engineers, woohoo!