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 .
Packaged GNOME 43’s Release Candidate for Ubuntu 22.10 and Debian.
Started the big evolution-data-server 3.45 transition in Debian. I expect it to migrate to Testing this weekend. This required a significant number of uploads to try to set enough dependency bumps and breaks to keep things working for most normal upgrades. This was a rare transition as part of the libsoup2 -> libsoup3 migration. Usually evolution-data-server and GNOME library transitions are far simpler.
Finished the prep work for the Nautilus 43 transition in Debian. I think we’ll start it next week. A lot of the work was done with Non-Maintainer Uploads which takes some time to do.
Reviewed Jesús’ work to get several of Debian’s packaged GNOME Shell extensions ready for GNOME Shell 43. We’ve now passed the halfway point on getting the extensions updated. There’s a chance we’ll push GNOME Shell 43 to Debian Unstable next week too.
Made a tiny update to get the gsconnect extension working again on Ubuntu & Debian’s GNOME 43.
Got permission from the previous maintainer to switch GNOME Feeds to Debian GNOME team maintainership. Unfortunately, the latest version requires a new dependency that isn’t in Debian yet.
Uploaded the file conflict fix for ghex. Upstream made my suggested fix.
Made tracker’s build tests fail the build on Debian and Ubuntu if they fail.
Re-enabled existing user mode for Debian’s GNOME Initial Setup app. Upstream had disabled it because they recommend GNOME Tour which conflicts a bit with it, but GNOME Tour isn’t in Debian.
Worked with GNOME Boxes upstream to get the new recommended downloads URL feature to work on Debian and Ubuntu. This allows us to update the default recommended OS downloads much faster than needing to go through the whole SRU process.
Added a gtedalias so that people using gnome-text-editor on Debian or Ubuntu can type that short command instead of the full app name. This is useful since some people like to launch their editor app from a terminal. Yes, we know there are other ways people could do that but it’s still helpful.
In Other News
tilix returned to Debian Testing for the first time since March.
Today I will depart for the Linux Plumbers conference 2022 and the Open Source Summit 2022 in Dublin, Ireland.
snapd: In snapped applications seeded for the initial installation of the OS, unfortunately, the default-provider: cups which is in the snapcraft.yaml for auto-installing the CUPS Snap as dependency for the cups printing interface, breaks the installation, even if the CUPS Snap is also seeded. A bug got reported and now we are waiting for @jamesh and @pedronis to fix this. The full integration of the dependency in the cups interface (not needing default-provider: cups) as promised by @mvo in Frankfurt in March is postponed for next cycle.
cups-filters:Completed the coding, bug fixing, and testing for the cups-filters 2.0b1 release. Continued cleaning up the coding style to the scheme of CUPS: This is the first bunch of files in the main directory of libcupsfilters.
Common Print Dialog Backends: Accepted PR from GSoC contributor Gaurav Guleria in cpdb-backend-cups to free allocated memory, forgotten in last week’s PR.
system-config-printer: Ubdated Kinetic to last week’s 1.5.18 release.
Ghostscript: 9.56.1 package got stuck in -proposed due to a xfig’s autopkgtest failing. Turned out to be a crasher in Ghostscript. Reported it upstream and got a fix (was already on upstream GIT post-9.56.1) immediately. Re-uploaded the package with the patch backported and now it makes its way into Kinetic.
Printer Applications under WSL: Gave @cnihelton some hints for working on the first snappy stage of the HOWTO in the coming week.
Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin: The conference is coming closer! Doing the last preparative steps. Attended BBB training meeting from the organizers of Linux Plumbers, together with @madhens, worked out with @madhens how to proceed on stage during the OpenPrinting micro-conference, assured that all speakers provide their slides, prepared my own slides, uploaded the slides to Indico (Note that Piotr Pawliczek works for Google and still needs approval for his slides), browsed schedules of conferences, scheduled some OpenPrinting/Linux Foundation coordination meeting, last preparations for the departure in a few hours …
Google Summer of Code 2022: Continued mentoring our 7 great contributors. Usual Telegram chats, video meetings, Pull Requests.
Upstreamed a fix for the gnome-shell crash in gbm_surface_release_buffer when the display config changes. Turns out it was specific to multi-GPU setups where the secondary GPU uses an open source driver. This bug is actually a good sign for jammy because despite being the second most common gnome-shell crash it only happens with dual-GPUs.
Proposed a mutter fix for the phantom cursor issue. Turns out it was triggered by triple buffering but the root cause was a much older bug in mutter.
updated my native messaging patch, it now passes the tests in Mozilla’s CI, and I cherry-picked the latest version of the patch in the nightly and beta snaps
Netplan testing - I tried to use just VMs for this but ended up debugging issues of trying to passthrough wifi through to the VM without using the bridge. Gave up and setup a crap laptop with jammy, ready for testing on the host this week.
firefox
thunderbird
snaps