Desktop Team Updates - Monday 15th August 2022

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 8th August 2022

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  • UbuntuPro implementation for gnome-initial-setup is essentially completed (or at least in a presentable state).
  • Tested several 22.04.1 builds, reported a couple of possible bugs.
  • Verified SRUs for gnome-control-center and gnome-boxes.
  • Chromium snap:
    • Merge request to replace cups-control by cups. (Thanks, Till, for nudging.)
    • VAAPI merge request to repositories of the latest/{beta,dev} channels.
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Desktop Installer

Subiquity

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  • Finished separating the “Calling All Themes” blog post into two (internal google docs links):
  • Drafted template for the email invite (another internal google doc link) for Ubuntu Summit and worked with the organizers to iterate on it. Now, it looks ready to go!
  • Started doing some research for the network-manager test plan (internal google doc link) and adding some ideas. I need to fill this out with actual steps, planned to be done before next system snaps meeting (Aug 25)
  • Worked on reviewing all of the amazing PRs (internal jira link) opened by @SergioCostas for porting our GNOME snaps to core22 and snapcraft7
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  • Started investigating easy-openvpn snap and complaints that we should not be distributing this (snap of a docker image) but we have ~3k users. Created DT-505 (internal jira link) to track the work needed to resolve the issue and I plan to make progress on the investigation stage before the next system snaps meeting (Aug 25)
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  • CUPS Snap/snapd: Helped our app snappers @nteodosio (Chromium), @oSoMoN (Firefox), and @SergioCostas (gnome-text-editor and evince) to make their Snaps use the cups snapd interface for printing. Chromium, Firefox, and evince work correctly and actually print through the cups interface with both their own dialogs and the GTK print dialog (and not only via xdg-desktop-portal, which could be enabled for the GTK dialog with the GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 environment variable setting). gnome-text-editor had a bug in the Snap packaging which caused a crash (already still with cups-control) and @SergioCostas fixed it, so it also works now. @hellsworth did not participate in our nice workshop. She told that she was building LibreOffice with the cups interface but she tells that there are still other problems to solve before printing can get tested.
  • Printer Applications and WSL: Worked with @cnihelton on making Printer Applications run under WSL to make legacy printers which Microsoft and also the manufacturer have adandoned print under Windows. @cnihelton has an old HP printer and finally succeeded to install the HPLIP Printer Application compiled from source, and also its dependencies pappl-retrofit, PAPPL, and cups-filters 2.x, also compiled from source, under WSL and to make his printer print. He has written a HOWTO which I have reviewed and then he has posted a Pull request for adding the HOWTO to the OpenPrinting web site. Still somewhat awkward but will get easier with the further development of WSL (systemd, Avahi, AppArmor, snapd). Update: The first version of the HOWTO is online on OpenPrinting!
  • cups-filters: The changes for making libcupsfilters not depend on libppd are now committed, in cups-filters itself, and also the needed adaptations in pappl-retrofit. Did some first tests and it mostly works. Update: During his work on the WSL printing HOWTO @cnihelton spotted and fixed a build/install failure due to the dependency reversal. Thanks a lot!
  • Qt Print Dialog/CPDB: Cute News! After the GSoC contributor Gaurav Guleria has finished the addition of support for the Common Print Dialog Backends (CPDB) in the GTK print dialog he had a look in the Firefox dialog but after some discussion we decided to try whether we can convince Qt upstreams to do the Qt dialog with him and this time it seems that it has worked out. Maintainer of Qt’s print dialog, Albert Astals Cid is now working with Gaurav on making this dialog finaly cute.
  • Common Print Dialog Backends (CPDB): Gaurav Guleria did some small API changes and also some feature additions to the CPDB libraries and this made me preparing the release of cpdb-libs 2.x, and once on it, I have done a general renaming of API functions, data types, and constants to be unique to avoid clashes with other libraries (prefixing with cpdb), similar to what I did with cups-filters. I am holding back the release for now to see whether more needs to be added while Gaurav is working on the Qt dialog.
  • Ubuntu Summit 2022: Further participation in the organization, especially the planned sessions. After @Gabriel-AN suggested a Robotics tutorial track We came to the conclusion to run the Snap tutorials not all on one day but instead, do a Snap tutorial track spread over the three days.
  • Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin: Scheduled the sessions inside the OpenPrinting micro-conference. Here are the complete, detailed schedules for the whole conference, with all the individual sessions in each MC/track: Full schedules.
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: Continued mentoring the 7 contributors for OpenPrinting. Usual online chats on Telegram and video meetings.
  • OpenPrinting: Monthly video meeting.
  • Bugs.
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:school: Wrote DesktopTeam/TestPlans/RemoteDesktop - Ubuntu Wiki
:school: Which was a prerequisite for the fdk-aac MIR
:school: Realized that gnome-text-editor 43 has a new universe dependency. Submitted the editorconfig-core MIR immediately so that hopefully we can get the updated gnome-text-editor into Ubuntu 22.10.
:school: The library puts its build tests in a separate git repo so I used the multiple orig tarball feature of dpkg, uscan, and git-buildpackage so that we could run the tests automatically at build time. Also fixed several minor Lintian warnings.
:school: Attended the weekly MIR meeting

:apple: Prepared epiphany security updates
:apple: Sponsored gnome-epub-thumbnailer which was accepted very quickly and had foliate recommend it. The Secrets app was also accepted.
:apple: Temporarily disabled lto so that the GNOME Calls app could build on Ubuntu. Upstream is working on fixing this properly.
:apple: Verified that the latest GNOME Builder 43 snapshot builds and runs locally. Need libpanel accepted from Debian NEW before I can upload this release. GNOME Builder 43 is a huge release, switching from GTK3 to GTK4.

:pencil2: Packaged poppler 22.08 (the version we’ll ship with Ubuntu 22.10) and completed the transition except for two packages that fail to build for other reasons
:pencil2: Prepared Nautilus 43 Beta and uploaded it to Experimental and Ubuntu 22.10 (proposed). This landmark release switched to GTK4 and made major changes to the API breaking all nautilus extensions.
:pencil2: Uploaded a new nautilus-python release and ported several Python extensions to the new version. I’m dropping a few Python extensions from Ubuntu 22.10 because they need to be ported to GTK4. We need to work through the C extensions soon. (Many will be dropped.)

:books: Uploaded GNOME Console 43 to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (and helped with the Debian upload). It has been ported to GTK4 and unfortunately there are some rough edges. (Console is still not the default terminal app for Ubuntu 22.10.)
:books: Prepared some GNOME 42.4 SRUs
:books: Did more ISO testing in preparation for the successful Ubuntu 22.04.1 release

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I was on vacation the whole week, so not bullet points this time :slight_smile:

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WSL

  • Tested the new applications prior to the 22.04.1 release.
  • Implemented the CI Release Workflow to easily store the debug symbols snapshot at the moment of a release. 263
  • Released 22.04.1 for WSL.
  • Fixed the CI routine to update the Ubuntu default app to the latest LTS right after the point-release. #267
  • Tested the new version of the default app.
  • Wrote a guide on how to use Printer Applications and Ubuntu WSL to enable printing from Windows when the printer is not supported by the said operating system, guided by @till-kamppeter.
  • Fixed a build/install issue in cups-filters due to the dependency reversal.

UDI

Desktop

Helped testing and troubleshooting an issue with NVidia drivers prior to the release of 22.04.1.

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firefox24 firefox

thunderbird24 thunderbird

  • uploaded 102.1.2 to kinetic

chromium22 chromium

  • updated dev to 106.0.5216.6

flutter24 Ubuntu Desktop Installer

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