Desktop Team Updates - Monday 14th March 2022

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 7th March 2022

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Desktop Installer

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  • CUPS Snap: @ijohnson has posted PRs to add the /var/cups diectory to the core Snaps and @mvo has accepted them. As the review-tools of the Snap Store already require the “cups-socket-directory: $SNAP_COMMON/run” line in snapcraft.yaml I have committed its addition in the CUPS Snap now. The CUPS Snap is technically completed for the new cups interface with it. Also tested the cups interface with a daily snapshot of snapd and hit a bug but the bug went away some days later. Re-posted the TODO list as the editability of the original one expired after 1 month. Now actually only the release of snapd 2.55 is missing for the cups interface to start to work. Also added dry-run mode for cups-proxyd, for debugging.
  • cups-filters: The week was very busy, so not much done on the way to cups-filters 2.x, only corrected the PCLm output of the ghostscript() filter function for monochrome jobs as applying the gray color profile to the RGB output does not work (commit, Ghostscript bug #705014).
  • Ghostscript: The crasher in Ghostscript I reported is solved now, by erroring out when supplying a gray profile to the (currently color-only) PCLm output. And my feature request for grayscale PCLm output got implemented!
  • CUPS: No need to merge the fix for Debian bug #1006853 as we have this patch as Ubuntu-specific patch already for longer time. Fixed a nasty bug of temporary CUPS queues to local IPP services, like IPP-over-USB or Printer Applications not working with the GTK print dialog (temporary queues to network destinations work, though). Took me 2 days of investigating the source code of CUPS and GTK. Posted a Pull Request on CUPS and applied the fix also as patch to Ubuntu’s CUPS 2.4.1op1-1ubuntu2 package.
  • flatpak: Asked the Red Hat people about how printing works in flatpak. They told that in flatpak, in contrary to Snap, only user applications are packaged, system programs and daemons, as CUPS, Printer Applications, or any other for of drivers are supposed to stay classically installed (RPM in case of Red Hat/Fedora). There is a printing interface in the flatpak sandbox for user applications. It is a D-Bus interface (portal) with methods for listing printers and options, and sending jobs. Would require modification of the user application to use this instead of talking to CUPS. I suggested creating a CPDB backend here but did not yet get an answer about this.
  • Linux Application Summit 2022: Submitted proposal for a 40-minute in-person talk “The New Architecture for Printing and Scanning - What Application and GUI Developers Need to Know”.
  • OpenPrinting/PWG Annual Meeting (OpenPrinting Summit): The agenda for the meeting is posted. It will take place as a virtual meeting on May 17-19.
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: Right after Google’s announcement that the Linux Foundation got accepted as mentoring organization the contributor candidates came up to me with their desires of project ideas to work on and that they want to start preparing. So I have done a preliminary assignment of the projects and started mentoring. One candidate has even presented his start on the CPDB support for the GTK print dialog and guided me for testing GTK4 without messing up my system.
  • Bugs.
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WSL:

Turning the systemd proof-of-concept into an experimental feature:

  • Wrote a C program to be the WSL Launcher entry point into systemd’s namespace, with a great help from @didrocks. PR is under review.
  • Adjusted the launcher code to invoke the above mentioned program. Will open a PR as soon as the above mentioned gets merged.

Code reviews:

  • Reviewed some U-D-I PR’s
  • Reviewed one PR for WSL launcher terminal theming feature.
  • Reviewd one PR for Subiquity.
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WSL:

  • Helped and reviewed the systemd’s namespace entrypoint with @cnihelton
  • Image transition: Ubuntu 20.04 -> Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (different application name) is done. Still have to do the “Ubuntu” one.
  • Updated to 20.04.4 “Ubuntu 20.04 LTS” and “Ubuntu” applications

Adsys:

  • Fixed a race when refreshes were missing for user scripts.
  • Fixed some tests hanging on ppcel64 due to new samba
  • Fixed armhf and arm64 flaky test (the only one!), 2 attempts, once success!

Misc:

  • MIR review
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  • fixed another case where TLP would bail out when power-profile-daemon is installed
  • did some snapd rebuilds for CVE fixes in staged packages
  • debugged a bit webkitgtk autopkgtest failing on arm64 and reported the issue upstream
  • updated the thunderbird snap to 91.7.0
  • sponsored an ubiquity slideshow flavor update
  • rebuilt some xserver rdepends with the new abi to help with proposed migration
  • Canonical HR reviews
  • worked on improvements to the onboarding process for new team members
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:pie: GNOME 42 RC packaging updates
:pie: Updated gpaste’s metadata for compatibility with GNOME Shell 42
:pie: Filed a FFe for webkit2gtk built with libsoup2
:pie: Filed a Main Inclusion Request for gnome-bluetooth3 as one way to improve Bluetooth handling in GNOME Shell.
:pie: Further review of the packaging for blueprint-compiler
:pie: Discussions about Ubuntu 22.04 LTS’s handling of the new dark color-scheme preference
:pie: Discovered and helped report a bug in our autopkgtest infrastructure
:pie: Rebuilt a lot of packages that use gdk-pixbuf as part of +1 maintenance work
:pie: Tweaked the featured downloads shown in GNOME Boxes on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. I’ll need to do more work upstream to get this experience working better for Ubuntu.

Highlighting work done by others

:cake: Firefox 98 now supports the new dark color-scheme

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Short week, swapped Monday, watched a sick kiddo on Thursday, then sick myself Friday.

  • AD doc refresh: Frustratingly installed Windows several times… using an old Windows VM should be good enough though. Hope to have more tangible progress on this doc effort this week.
  • gnome-shell-extension-manager and blueprint-compiler are up on salsa now, preparing to upload to Debian. Thanks so much to @jbicha and @kenvandine for your help :slight_smile:
  • 360s review
  • LAS - preparing for the final weeks of talk submissions, final website updates
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firefox24 firefox

  • the 98.0 update was published to all supported Ubuntu releases and for all architectures, except for arm64 because of an upstream regression that is being investigated
  • Bisected arm64 builds to investigate said upstream regression, which turned out to be caused by a bulk update of rust crates (49). Bisected further and narrowed down to 3 interdependent crates. This will hopefully help upstream understand and address the actual cause of the regression.
  • prepared and tested the 98.0.1 update and handed over to the security team
  • continued work to integrate the native messaging portal in Firefox

chromium22 chromium

  • updated beta to 100.0.4896.30
  • updating dev to 101.0.4929.5

package24 other

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