Desktop Team Updates - Monday 14th June 2021

[jibel]

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 7th June 2021

[jibel]

• WSL
  • Root filesystem is now created in Launchpad.
  • Analyzed the current build system and release process.
  • Experimented with WSL image build on Azure.
• Recovery Key
  • Updating the PR to display a warning if the target to save the key is a non-removable drive.

[robert.ancell]

• Implemented all basic Appstream support in appstream.dart.
• Fixed firmware code and YAML documentation issues in Appstream (#325, #327, #328, #329).
• Reviewed Flutter PRs.
• Voted in the GNOME Foundation 2021 elections. If you can, do vote and if you’re not a foundation member but are a GNOME contributor please join!
• Worked on how to send/receive file descriptors over Dart sockets.
• Landed software-properties support for ESM status in impish, hirsute, focal, bionic.
• +1 rotation.

[vanvugt]

• Lots of bug management in Launchpad and upstreams. [Backlog stats]
• My last desktop-icons-ng bug fix for scaled desktops was merged upstream.
• Proposed a fix to mutter’s CLUTTER_PAINT=damage-region debug mode. Merged upstream in mutter 41.
• Proposed a couple of fixes to gnome-shell’s Looking Glass debug mode. Merged upstream in gnome-shell 41.
• Redesigned the box-shadow optimization in gnome-shell 41 to avoid breaking some theoretically possible styles.
• Investigating poor scrolling performance in the GNOME icon grid while testing triple buffering… Wrote an optimization that almost doubles scrolling performance even with regular old double buffering.

[laney]

• More tracker 3 progress (silo), continuing this week
• Reviews of private autopkgtest work from @sil2100
• Some debugging of arm64 autopkgtest queues/bugs, chatting with IS and @dannf (thanks all for the help so far)

[oSoMoN]

firefox

• confirmed video playback regression on arm with Firefox 89, and linked to upstream bug report
• continued work on building the firefox snap from source in Launchpad

chromium

• updated stable to 91.0.4472.101
• updated beta to 92.0.4515.51
• updated dev to 93.0.4535.3

Ubuntu Desktop Installer

• fixed clumsy wording reported by @popey

[3v1n0]

One day less

GNOME

• More appindicators extension fixes and improvements [commit]
• Rewritten the shell extensions downloader to be fully async (and non UI-blocking) and supporting compiling gsettings schemas locally [MR]
• Rewritten the gnome-shell file utils to avoid UI blocking calls and be async (in js terms) [commits]
• Found a mutter issue on texture saving in big-endian, debugged the problem a bit [issue]

Packaging

• Fixed gnome-packaging-tools to handle epoch as it used to do, and to export more variables
• Uploaded gnome-contacts 40 to debian (and synced)
• Uploaded gnome-calendar 40.2 to debian (and synced)
• Finalized merging of gsettings-desktop-schemas in ubuntu and updated ubuntu-settings accordingly (dropping various unity or old-gnome overrides).
• Uploaded gnome-control-center 40.0 to debian and merged with ubuntu, removing various patches.
• Uploaded gnome-shell-extension-appindicator to debian

[didrocks]

• WSL
  • Root filesystem is now created in Launchpad.
  • Analyzed the current build system and release process.
  • Experimented with WSL image build on Azure.

[till-kamppeter]

• CUPS Snap: Waiting for the completion of the cups printing interface by the snapd developers, esp. @ijohnson.
• cups-filters: Completed the addition of the filterExternalCUPS() filter function which calls classic, CUPS filter executables.
• PAPPL: Fixed PAPPL not supporting string/text-style vendor options and provided a patch.
• PostScript Printer Application: Added support for CUPS filters used in PostScript PPD files, especially used by HP and Ricoh to allow secure, PIN-protected printing, added the hpps filter of HPLIP to the Snap to allow PIN-based printing on HP PostScript printers. Also implemented support for custom option settings (string/text/numeric/…), both for PIN-based printing on Ricoh and for retro-fitting drivers, but not yet committed due to missing support in PAPPL, patch attached to the PAPPL issue #142.
• Google Summer of Code 2021: Coding period has officially started, mentoring the students. First online meeting with the 5 students.
• OpenPrinting: June news post
• Bugs.

[callmepk]

• Focused on developing and debugging the Ubuntu WSL preseeding