Desktop Team Updates - Monday 10th October 2022

Desktop Team Updates
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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 .

Last week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates - Monday 3rd October 2022

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Active Directory

  • Implemented the first part of the policy manager for AppArmor machine profiles, which currently handles:
    • additive/incremental application of AppArmor profile files
    • complete removal of AppArmor profiles managed by adsys
  • The next part will focus on granular profile removal and caching
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  • Got the Feature Freeze Exception for gnome-text-editor 43 after the Main Inclusion Request for the editorconfig-core library wasn’t approved in time
  • Updated gnome-shell-extension-manager in Kinetic. This is still blocked in Debian because the text-engine library has been stuck in the NEW queue there for months.
  • GNOME Shell and Mutter 43 landed in Debian Testing. This includes the triple buffering feature that Ubuntu 22.04 LTS has, but still hasn’t been reviewed upstream for inclusion in GNOME directly.
  • gtkmm4, the C++ bindings for GTK 4, landed in Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 22.10.
  • Several apps have landed in Debian and Ubuntu 22.10 for the first time: apostrophe, gnome-network-displays, and wike. Matthias did the packaging and I sponsored and reviewed.
  • Some Nautilus extensions that had previously been removed from Ubuntu because of the Nautilus 43 transition have been added back since people have ported them to the new version: nautilus-share, nautilus-image-converter, and eiciel.
    • nautilus-share used to be included by default in Ubuntu but has been demoted to universe. It depends on samba to work and it’s not desired to have samba running by default in Ubuntu Desktop.
  • Joined the GNOME Release Team
  • Persevering through some major complications from Hurricane Ian
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  • [Firefox] Enabled Wasm sandboxing for ARM.
  • [Network-manager-openvpn] Assembled patch.
  • [Geocode-glib] New binary package geocode-glib-common (still figuring out copyright details with Jeremy).
  • [Plymouth] Started working on the revival of the Freetype plugin merge request.
  • [Speech dispatcher] Investigating invalid language error and segfault.
  • Chromium snap:
    • Stable: 106.0.5249.91.
    • Candidate: 106.0.5249.103.
    • Beta: 107.0.5304.18 and 107.0.5304.29.
    • Edge: 108.0.5327.0.
  • Chromium Bionic deb:
    • Handed over 106.0.5249.91 to security review.
    • 108 built successfully on x86.
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Apport

  • Finished changes to redirect apport bug reports on WSL to the Ubuntu/WSL repository issues page. Apport #1.

Snapd

  • Continued work on having snapd tell WSL1 apart from WSL2 Apport #12179

WSL

  • Started working on checking that key apps work on WSL+systemd
  • Reviewed Carlos’ implementation of Ubuntu WSL’s end-to-end test framework WSL 281, WSL 283, WSL 286
  • Made some contributions to WSL’s end-to-end test framework WSL 287

Other

  • Gave presentation about WSL + numerical computation. Started getting it ready to turn it into a webinar.
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ubuntu_session

  • added systemd-logind as fallback
  • added simple, unified API for methods common among various desktop environments (at least logout(), reboot(), shutdown()
  • published 0.0.2

firmware-updater

  • added basic error handling during firmware installation
  • generalize message dialogs, added error messages #101
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Workshops

Other

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Active Directory

  • Implemented policy manager to handle drive mount policies for users;
  • Implemented package and integration tests for the mentioned manager;
  • Integrated them into adsys.
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  • Last Monday was a bank holiday so I was OOO
  • Got set up with Jira basics so I can get started with tracking my work
  • supported @dloose and @jpnurmi with some firmware updater UX reviews
  • discussed with Martin Storey from the UX research team what might be needed for next cycle. Focused on Ubuntu Workshops initial design
  • other Web & Design team related meetings and tasks
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WSL

  • Implemented the end-to-end testing architecture. With those merges we have the tools to develop a CI workflow capable of installing an automated version of the appx for end-to-end testing. Pull requests #281, #283, #286, #294 and UDI #1173

  • Reviewed pull requests #287 and #291

UDI

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firefox24 firefox

thunderbird24 thunderbird

  • prepared the 102.3.1 update and handed over to the security team

flutter24 Ubuntu Store

package24 other

  • submitted two abstracts for the upcoming Ubuntu Summit
    • a 25min talk: “Native messaging for strictly confined browsers”
    • a workshop co-hosted with Scarlett Moore (KDE): “Snapping desktop applications”
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  • update software-properties to only show the ubuntu pro controls on LTS series and landed the update to Kinetic
  • enabled translations for ubuntu-advantage-desktop-daemon on the different series where it was SRUed
  • changed iwd to install the nm configuration in /usr to avoid confilles issues
  • verified if the speech-dispatcher systemd activation is working for snaps, hit a random segfault and reported it upstream
  • updated the ffe to update pipewire and include a new system group to be used to give rt permissions and uploaded the package
  • reviews, sponsoring and bug triage
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  • cups-filters: Code clean-up work for the cups-filters 2.x release continuing, especially merged libfontembed into libcupsfilters, as it is only used by the cfFilterTextToPDF() filter function, really nowhere else, it has also no reverse dependencies in Ubuntu (neither Main nor Universe). Its code (a lot for being a part of the texttopdf CUPS filter GSoC project) has also a lot of TODOs, so it probably is not ideal for general use but serves well in the text filter function.
  • foomatic-db: Upstream daily snapshots are up and running again! Updated the package for Kinetic.
  • Getting Cute - The KDE/Qt Print Dialog: Tested the Common Print Dialog Backends (CPDB) support on the Qt print dialog done by GSoC contributor Gaurav Guleria and settled with him on some last fixes. Now it is nicely working, including with temporary CUPS queues and ready for a future of changes in CUPS and new cloud printing services. Note that the (early-2000s) UI does not have changed, we only changed the inner workings. Thanks, Gaurav for your great work! (Gaurav’s GSoC contribution)
  • GNOME Control Center “Printers” module: Our sub-team of the GSoC contributors Mohit Verma and Shivam Mishra is in the last two weeks of the project and in very good shape. Unfortunately there is no input of GNOME’s UI design team yet (especially for that I extended the project by 6 weeks) and therefore i contacted @elioqoshi and he will help with it in the Ubuntu 23.04 cycle (the release where we want to land the New Architecture).
  • Retro-fitting Printer Applications/pappl-retrofit/PAPPL: Michael Sweet released PAPPL 1.2.3 with a correction for string-type user-settable options (passwords, fax numbers, …). With this and after getting some help from him I should be able to do the Printer Applications without patches on PAPPL! He also added a feature to auto-select the A4/Letter default by locale and earlier there was already support for localization/human-readable strings and SNMP-based ink-level checking. So now I have everything to be able to get all my planned features into pappl-retrofit and the retro-fitting Printer applications, but cups-filters 2.0b1 first …
  • Ubuntu Summit 2022: Finished co-speaker line-ups for the Snap Tutorial Track workshops: @oSoMoN’s co-speaker on “Snapping desktop apps” will be Scarlett Moore, doing the part for snapping KDE/Qt apps, and my co-speaker on the “Daemon Snapper’s Workshop” will be Sergio Cazzolato. Also reviewed some more submissions, discovered a talk/demo of the Brachiograph by its creator, @danieleprocida (Canonical’s Director of Documentation) and suggested him to do a workshop where the attendees build their own plotter and he accepted! Also did some first brainstorming with Sergio Cazzolato about the Daemon Snapper’s workshop.
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: Continued mentoring our 7 great contributors. Usual Telegram chats, video meetings, Pull Requests. Sun/Mon Midnight the program ended for the first 4 contributors. Reviewed their final reports, helped them to get their submission ready to meet the Sunday night deadline. The other 3 are still on their great work for 2 weeks.
  • Bugs.
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Steam Snap

  • Working on building and testing custom steam-runtime-tools
    • Exploring options for exposing host OS
  • Started work on exposing host OS for the purpose of Steam’s hardware surveys
  • Tested various new builds of Steam
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