Desktop Team Updates – Monday 13th February 2023

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 6th February 2023

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  • Started packaging the first bits of GNOME 44 Beta for Debian Experimental and Ubuntu 23.04. It’s too late in Debian’s preparations for Debian 12 “Bookworm” for GNOME 44 to be appropriate for Debian Unstable now. GNOME 44 Beta is expected next week.
  • Isolated the fix and prepared the SRU for an emoji display bug Nathan found while verifying the Unicode 15 color emoji font update for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
  • Pinged the Debian maintainer for ell who merged in Seb’s autopkgtest addition.
  • Merged libjpeg-turbo for the first time since it was packaged in Debian.
  • Merged pulseaudio with a more clear list of what the Ubuntu changes are. Maybe these changes could be pushed to Debian after Debian 12 is released.
  • Added a transitional package for the rename of the binary package gnome-bluetooth to gnome-bluetooth-sendto
  • Uploaded rust-gstreamer-player-sys to Ubuntu’s NEW queue. This is a prerequisite for packaging several GNOME related apps written in Rust, but there is an unresolved dispute with Debian’s ftpmasters that has so far blocked its inclusion in Debian.
  • Started a discussion about the Debian ftpmaster decision to bundle a bunch of unrelated GNOME Shell extensions into a single source and binary package.
  • Figured out a way to keep pipewire-media-session-pulseaudio from showing up on our component-mismatches* reports
  • Learned more about Lubuntu packaging. Got in the way a bit there, but I hope I helped some too.
  • Sponsored some merges and packaging updates
  • More rebuilds for ongoing Ubuntu transitions
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Installer

Yaru

  • Worked on a federated yaru_window plugin that would give us full control over the top-level Flutter window on Linux, provides a stub implementation on Web, and delegates other platforms to the window_manager package.
  • Added Cinnamon and Unity colors and themes to yaru_colors.dart and yaru.dart.

Other

  • Added option to use handy_window without widget tree manipulation
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  • Lots of bug triage and user support in Launchpad and upstreams. Backlog stats are here.
  • Triple buffering for GNOME 44:
    • Fixed CI failures.
    • More benchmarking of last week’s fix shows over 10% reduction in CPU usage for cursor movement. It also shows lower latency by dropping to double buffering sooner and more reliably (without compromising frame rate).
    • Proposed the new optimization to Debian for inclusion in lunar.
  • Cherry picked a crash fix missing from jammy.
  • Work in progress testing and and fixing NV12 support for mutter.
  • Internal:
    • Helping Partner Engineering with new hardware enablement
    • Feature discussions with other partners
    • Training
    • Travel planning
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Software store

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  • CUPS: Michael Sweet has released the first beta of libcups 3.0! This is the first of the new split components of CUPS 3.x. It will not only have deprecated features removed, like PPD file and classic driver support, but also a lot of new functionality, like for example a DNS-SD API, a JSON API, a localization API, vast improvements on ipptool, more consistent APIs, new PWG media sizes, …
  • cups-filters: Zdenek Dohnal ran Coverity on libcupsfilters (PR) and libppd (PR), discovering several bugs (memory leaks, possible buffer overflows, …) and fixed those. Thank you very much, Zdenek! Fixed also a long-standing bug which broke printing on several monchrome driverless IPP printers due to all PPD generators setting RGB as default color mode in the PPD. Fixed in CUPS, libppd, and in cups-filters 1.x.
  • Braille Printer Application: Zdenek Dohnal improved the privilege dropping of the cups-brf CUPS backend. Thanks a lot.
  • Common Print Dialog Backends/GTK Print Dialog: In the 4.9.4 version of GTK the Merge Request for Gaurav Gulerias GSoC work on adding CPDB support to GTK’s print dialog got finally accepted. To reach this goal, Gaurav also needed to do a lot of enhancements on CPDB itself, and when his merge request got accepted into GTK, CPDB 2.0b1 was already 2 months old and after that a lot of changes have been done, ending up with GTK’s CPDB support not building with any released version of CPDB. Therefore we have now released version 2.0b2 of all the three components of the CPDB to allow easy building of the first CPDB-supporting GTK.
  • Ghostscript: Updated the Lunar packages of Ghostscript to upstream version 10.00.0, to have the newest features, like for example an always faster PDF interpreter, and especially all support for cups-filters 2.x and the New Architecture of printing.
  • Linux App Summit 2023 in Brno: Submitted 3 proposals: First is a 40-min talk (~25 min talk itself and ~15 AMA/discussion) reporting about of the state of the art of the printing GUIs, especially CPDB in the GTK and Qt print dialogs and the “Printers” module of the GNOME Control Center, if possible also with demos. Second is a BoF for further discussion of the printing GUI and other OpenPrinting subjects. On both these sessions Zdenek Dohnal, Marek Kasik, Albert Astals Cid, and Harald Sitter will be present. And the third is a workshop to learn snapping apps, “Your Application Everywhere, just in a Snap!”. It will be similar to the “Snapping like Hell(sworth)” workshop of the Ubuntu Summit. Also stepped up for reviewing the submissions. Had already a quick look over the submissions so far, will be a great conference! Anyone here, please submit yours! Deadline is Feb 19, this Sunday!
  • Google Summer of Code 2023: Continued assigning GitHub issues and other work items to contributor candidates and mentored them on working on the issues. Partially I am also already introducing candidates into possible projects. Also guiding mentors of other (non-OpenPrinting) workgroups of the Linux Foundation to post their project ideas.
  • Bugs.
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