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.
Rework transaction underlying system to reduce code needed in each GRPC call. Ensure that we autocancel changes in ZFS requests.
Add/Generalize idling daemon timeout support and fix some data races and deadlocks found by tests
Add i18n support and tag all messages with it. Created some generators and ensure they are idemnpotent in po generation. Reuse some part of snap core (but reworked all the tests). Add module support to go-gettext fork used by snapd.
Ensure all generators can install in a specific directory (for installing during package building) and that we don’t modify the repo when in install mode (so that generated source code is the one which ends up being built in the package).
Reviewed/discussed with jibel ubiquity MP for fixing “ext4” warning, always change ZFS bpool version, create an ESP in ZFS and move grub to it and more fixing wrong dialog, ZFS layout bpool.
Commented on the swap zvol deadlock upstream bug, which created an interesting conversation (we need to investigate/give a try to some options).
investigated a bug where the chromium snap uses GTK dialogs in KDE and managed to fix it but it adds 60MB of stage packages to the snap (compressed size), so I want to look into it further before bumping the size that much
cups-filters: Applied several fixes to the pdftops (PDF to PostScript) filter as it did not work when Poppler was selected as PDF renderer and printing in grayscale was requested (Upstream issue #169).
cups-filters: Eliminated all compiler warnings when building the package.
cups-filters: Investigated why for a certain printer CUPS generates a working PPD file but cups-filters not. It is due to the fact that some driverless IPP printers report to understand PWG Raster but in fact are not able to print this format. CUPS had already fixed it earlier. Fixed it in cups-filters now (Upstream pull request #168, upstream issue #171).
cups-filters: Further investigations about differences between PPD files generated by CUPS and by cups-filters (Upstream issue #171).
OpenPrinting: Discussion of future work on the mailing list, especially about the deprecation of PPD files by CUPS upstream and the so required Printer Applications (printer drivers in the form of a daemon emulating a driverless IPP printer on localhost, Trent, we need the localhost support in Avahi!!!).
Hardware: Investigated why the keyboard of my Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga stopped working, searching for Ubuntu bugs and more, asking on IRC but not finding anything useful assuming a hardware defect, opening ticket at Lenovo, they sent a technician to fix and it is working again now. Good that I bought an on-site warranty extension.
Various fixes and improvements to ZFS support in the installer:
zfs:
Added an advanced features dialog to the partitioning page. LVM, LVM with encryption and experimental ZFS support have been moved to this dialog.
Use version 5000 for bpool with some features disabled to stay compatible with grub and prevent users from upgrading and breaking their systems.
The partman confirmation dialog now displays the final layout of the partition that will be created instead of the true but confusing message from partman telling that an ext4 partition will be created
Calculate the size of bpool to be 500M < 5% partition size < 2G
The cause of the “Unexpected snap type” error jdstrand observed on xenial turned out to be due to Pulse Audio 8 linking to libjson-c. The snapd-glib library links to libjson-glib, and there is a symbol name clash between the two JSON parsing libraries.
Newer versions of Pulse Audio dropped the libjson-c dependency in favour of an internal JSON parser due to similar incompatibilities. That change applied cleanly to xenial’s PA, and cleared up the problems.
snapd pull requests:
I updated the portal-info PR work be a sub-command of snap routine.
I’ve started updating the user session agent client library PR to work with the finalised API.
libreoffice
snaps
other
firefox
thunderbird
chromium