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.
84.0.4147.105 update sponsored to {xenial,bionic}-security by the security team
updated beta to 85.0.4183.59
updated dev to 86.0.4221.3
improved the UX of migration of deb to snap by displaying an explanatory notice in a new tab when the snap is run for the first time and an existing profile has been imported
Clarified the branch is releasable as-is, although the feature is only enabled in Xorg sessions at the moment. So we could patch it to groovy 3.38.
Continued trying to fix the Wayland backend.
Testing Intel performance with kernel 5.8.0. Power management is much better, frequency scaling is much better, but it’s still not a substitute for this branch. Even kernel 5.4 with this mutter branch performs better than kernel 5.8.
Printer Applications/cups-filters: Converted also the pdftops filter into a filter function, creates a wrapper function to easily get a CUPS filter from a filter function, put out contributor guidelines for converting further CUPS filters, GSoC students are currently converting pclmtoraster and rastertops. working on a concept for listing and finding a PPD for a given printer (for retro-fitting classic drivers), most probably import code of the /usr/lib/cups/daemon/cups-driverd utility without *.drv support. Started writing functions to add IPP job/printer attribute support to filter functions.
CUPS Snap: @jdstrand and @kenvandine have talked about snapd interface work to be done in desktop team. Created a Trello card on the Ubuntu Desktop Snaps board summarizing the situation and what needs to be done. No Pull Request on the CUPS Snap from @jdstrand yet, he tells that he is currently busy with other things.
cups-filters: More bug fixes and small enhancements from LFMP student selection process and actual LFMP projects: driverless utility has IPPS support now, texttopdf does not crash any more when emoji fonts are installed, gstopdf (PostScript-to-PDF filter) gets better image output quality.
Common Print Dialog Backends (CPDB): GSoC student succeeded to get it working in the Qt print dialog but with unsatisfactory code quality and low work effort. After several times being unsuccessful with the project a former GSoC student will help to finish up with this project after this year’s GSoC.
sane-airscan: Packaged the SANE backend for driverless scanning for Ubuntu (currently AirScan, eSCL, WSD. Soon IPP Scan will be added).
Google Summer of Code 2020: Continued mentoring work, answered student’s questions, explained them what is needed, …
Linux Foundation Mentorship Program: Our 2 students are coding. The one on fax support familiarized herself with the driverless utility and will now extend it to also allow setting up fax queues with standard printer setup tools. This will give fax support on thousands of (IPP driverless) multi-function printers in Ubuntu 20.10! The other student is investigating installation of proprietary printer drivers in a chroot. We are also selecting the 2 IPP Scan students to start next month.
Linux Plumber’s Conference 2020 (Virtual): Continued to organize our OpenPrinting micro-conference. It is now scheduled for Friday, August 28, 2pm to 6pm UTC, as this is the best time for our speakers.
Continued work and refactory to support the eprivacy screen, had some discussion with upstream (Jonas) to fix some issues triggered by the eprivacy hotkey (udev) events we have in incoming new KMS branch (I’m basing my work on).
Distro
Various SRU verifications (still waiting some mutter user reports though), and e.u.c results debugging
Started preparing 3.37.x packages for the shell stack
6.4.5 for focal: should be accepted by the releases team this friday at the earliest
learned a valuable lesson about orig tarballs regarding the focal sru of libreoffice 6.4.5 - they must match exactly between the focal and groovy series.
6.4.5 for groovy: just need armhf autopkgtests to pass. looks like builder failures - no real issue.
7.0.0 for groovy: started looking at the packages ricotz built and going through the test plan. Went off on a tangent trying to add the yaru fonts in to minimize testing but talked with ricotz and it’s best to do that later. currently building final version in ppa so we can run autopkgtests
Everything else
continued with adding the snapcraft-preloads into the extension. tested that all 3 new libraries work correctly and opened PR for gnome-3-28-1804. need to test other arches though first and they are all currently failing. needs investigation
looked more into network-manager snap. Trying to answer key questions around its maintenance… when should 1.22 be released? how do we deliver it (because the store tracks are non-standard)? are we going to build with the netplan plugin afterall (spoiler alert: yes)? what are the tests being run on network-manager snap (both manual and automated)? got some answers… need to force others
Continued working on update-manager. My previous approach was not good, so I bzr reverted and now I’m trying a new one, which should be better. I think I’m going to need to call on the help of someone for the kernel selection (we might have decided that the OEM kernel linux-oem is better for a particular model, and need to switch the kernel an installed system uses, or roll systems off linux-oem back to linux, and doing that is a bit delicate).
snapd PR #8943 (install D-Bus service activation files for snaps) is still waiting for a security review.
snapd theme installation support:
I reworked snapd PR #9043 (REST API access control) based on review feedback. Previously it provided a set of access checker primitives that could be composed to implement a complete policy. Now it provides four access checker implementations that correspond to the levels of access described in the REST API documentation. An access checker for the new theme API will be able to slot in next to these ones.
There is still some open questions about naming of some of the checkers. Whatever decision is made, I think we should make sure we maintain consistency with the documentation.
This PR will require a security review, since it affects every API request to snapd.
This adds an optional --pid argument to the snapctl is-connected command, to have it only consider connections with the snap identified by the given process ID. This could allow a daemon to use SO_PEERCRED information to discover whether it is talking to a peer that has plugged into a particular slot.
In particular, this would provide a way for @till-kamppeter’s CUPS snap to distinguish between clients with permission to print and clients with permission to control CUPS, all without snap-control access.
thunderbird
chromium
other
Gnome Shell and friends:
Bug tracking: