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.
Tested updates to gnome-logs, gnome-system-monitor, gnome-calculator, and gnome-characters and used the new progressive release feature to release them to stable. All worked well and release was spread out of 18 hours.
Added common-id to more snaps
Snap Store:
Backported fix for app icons for deb packages and seeded apt-config-icons in Groovy and Focal Bug 1864307
ppc64el testing broke in both of our cloud regions that have the hardware to do this for different reasons, worked with sysadmins to try to get this fixed - still ongoing
snapd PR #5822 (support for user session daemons) was merged last week. This PR was started in September 2018, so I’m glad to see it merged. One thing that helped get it over the line was the snapd team’s recent work to improve the reliability of spread tests that test user session behaviour.
I’ve updated snapd PR #6258 (dbus activation) to fix conflicts after the merge of #5822. I’m currently updating it to require activatable dbus services be daemons, now that we have user session daemons. It still needs to go through code review, but I expect this should be an easier process than the last was.
snap theme auto-installation:
Discussed plans for theme auto installation at the last snapd/desktop review meeting. The plan is still to follow the design outlined in the notes I posted previously. There was some concern about giving this service snapd-control access, so that might end up requiring some changes down the line. I think further discussion on that front will need to wait until I have a working prototype, so we can see what the minimal set of permissions needed by the service are.
There has also been some community interest in this feature on the forum over the weekend. This is my next priority after dbus activation, so hopefully I’ll have something to demonstrate shortly.
I also did some work on a fix for a security issue, getting it to the point where it could be handed off to the security team.
Snapcraft/CUPS Snap: Further work on the Snap: Now it uses the standard domain socket (/run/cups/cups.sock) and standard port (631) when it provides the only running CUPS on the system, upstream CUPS version is 2.3.3 containing the latest security fixes, Debian package patches for option/choice/attribute conversion between PPD and IPP and also for correctly working cupsctl are included, fonts.conf file for texttopdf filter corrected, and an unneeded patch removed.
PAPPL: Working with GSoC students and Michael Sweet on the next steps to be done, currently printer discovery and job handling.
HPLIP: Introduced developers at HP into the new Printer-Application-based printer/scanner driver architecture.
ippusbxd: Forwarded crasher bug to the upstream GitHub and got fix from the contributor of this piece of code.
Google Summer of Code 2020: Introduced most of the students into their projects, answered their questions, … Mentoring of the students has started.
OpenPrinting Summit and PWG Meeting (virtual event): Attended the conference from Tue to Fri and presented my OpenPrinting overview on Tue, the OpenPrinting day. Here is the complete agenda.
Housekeeping:
Gnome Shell and friends:
firefox
thunderbird
chromium
snaps
other