Desktop Team Updates - Monday 12th April 2021

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 5th April 2021 🐇

2 Likes
6 Likes
  • ADSys (GPO Client for Ubuntu Desktop)
    • Added integration tests
5 Likes

ADSys (GPO Client for Ubuntu Desktop)

  • Added integration tests + integration with CI. Still ongoing (miss AD mocking)

Ubuntu Report:

5 Likes
  • cherry picked a GTK fix for GNOME 40, it isn’t in Ubuntu yet but ppa users are hitting problems without it and it’s going to be useful when start working on the update
  • GNOME update (evince, gnome-font-viewer, gnome-sudoku, file-roller, seahorse)
  • Updated the gstreamer stack to the current bugfix versions
  • spent some time trying to figure out the webkitgtk/balsa/armhf issue
  • fixed xdg-utils build failing
  • SRU to focal
  • dashboards
    • include snap-store in the snaps report
    • proposed changes to add a KPI collector for the versions script stats
  • sponsoring
    • alsa-lib oem fixes
    • new vala stable update for ricotz
    • reviewed a proposed bluez change to hint of reboot required in the postinst for some raspi devices
  • snaps
    • rebuild, tested candidate and promoted to stable a few snaps that needed USN rebuilds
    • updated evince-master to 3.38 to fix the build
    • fixed gnome-2048 build on arm64
    • updated gnome-robots to the 3.38 stable serie
    • fixed the evince build on launchpad, it was using the wrong distribution serie there
    • updated thunderbird stable to 78.9.1
4 Likes
  • Worked some more on the production autopkgtest-cloud redeploy, basically good to go I think now. I’ll probably do this in the quiet period after we release next week.
  • Had a meeting with some peeps to plan autopkgtest work for the next cycle
  • Helped unstick the cloud workers which broke while I was off
  • Looked into the flatpak failure which was blocking glib2.0 in hirsute-proposed, uploaded a fix, glib migrated now
  • Reviewed and merged some changes from Seb to the KPIs, reported some small issues which got fixed too
  • Supplied a fix for apport and polkit prompting, making it launch its own pkttyagent.
5 Likes
  • CUPS Snap in the snapd environment: Completed the new auxiliary daemon cups-proxyd and accompanying CUPS backend proxy to let the CUPS Snap’s cupsd work as a proxy/firewall CUPS daemon if the Snap is installed on a system which already has a classically installed CUPS. Tested it and it works as expected. Now we can change the cups interface so that snapped applications plugging cups can only communicate with the CUPS Snap (which has Snap mediation against administrative CUPS requests) and not with the classically installed CUPS, but the snapped applications see the print queues as of the classic CUPS and jobs go through the drivers of the classic CUPS. See also the GIT commit and the README.md.
  • CUPS Snap in the snapd environment: Continued discussion on the design of the new cups printing interface with @jamesh and @ijohnson. Came up to a conclusion on how the interface should look like. Discussion is still ongoing.
  • cups-filters: Released version 1.28.8 upstream and uploaded it to Ubuntu Hirsuite to get the bug fixes of the last few weeks in.
  • avahi: Uploaded 0.8-5ubuntu3 with bug fixes backported from upstream, one fixing a possible DoS.
  • sane-airscan: The upstream author has done the fixes needed for the MIR. Waiting for @alexmurray to review them.
  • Google Summer of Code 2021: Students continue to work on their proposals. We have 5 promising proposals for OpenPrinting now. The students have to submit their final proposals by tomorrow, April 13.
  • OpenPrinting: Monthly video meeting and April news post
  • Bugs.
4 Likes

firefox24 firefox

thunderbird24 thunderbird

flutter24 Ubuntu Desktop Installer

package24 other

4 Likes
  • Refactored signal handling API in dbus.dart.
  • Added improved object management APIs into dbus.dart.
  • Released dbus.dart 0.4.0, updated desktop_notifications.dart to use this.
5 Likes

Short week - off for 2 days

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snapd pull requests:

  • Received some more feedback on snapd PR #9043 (REST API authentication refactor), with a request to split out some of the code into separate pull requests. That led to:

    • snapd PR #10126 (already merged), containing some small cleanups to the unix socket credentials code.
    • snapd PR #10127 (one of two approvals received), containing the new access checker implementations without actually replacing the old access code.

    I’m hopeful that the remaining parts will be merged soon, so we can move on to making the theme installation API accessible without use of snapd-control.

Ubuntu Core GDM experiment:

  • Made some adjustments to better support the desktop-launch plug, by making sure XDG_DATA_DIRS and PATH are set correctly in the user systemd and dbus environments when running the confined desktop session. I tried also setting DISPLAY/WAYLAND_DISPLAY ahead of time, but that broke the session (presumably it thought it was running in X11 mode and failed when it couldn’t find the X server).
  • It still seems necessary to restart the user session after installing snaps and connecting their x11 interface for them to be able to successfully connect, so hopefully that can be worked through.
  • Having a simple desktop slot implementation that could give apps access to system fonts from the boot file system would probably be the next big win for allowing external snaps to run on the image.
5 Likes

Libreoffice

deb

snap

  • fixed icon/dark-theme issue 1915677, and just waiting on reporter to test proposed fix
  • went off on a rabbit hole about quoting in the --with-theme autotool argument. There is a shelex.quote behaving strangely but found this while chasing a red herring.

Everything Else

4 Likes
  • Fixed handling of events in Gtk4 with gjs [MR]
  • More tests for gobject-introspection handling of fundamental types [MR]
  • More cleanups on the gjs memory issues (reason why I din’t update ubuntu to latest stable) [MR] and more fixes [MR]
  • Updates to libfprint-tod and better testing for potential ABI/API changes [commits]
  • Libfprint upstream reviews and reworked the devices features handling [MR]
  • More fprintd duplicate enroll cleanups [MR, merged]
  • Reviewed Daniel’s mutter and gnome-shell patches and prepared uploads
3 Likes