Desktop Team Updates - Monday 15th August 2022

Project Discussion Desktop
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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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