Desktop Team Updates - Monday 15th March 2021

Project Discussion Desktop
10
  • CUPS/CUPS Snap: All needed interface auto-connections are in place now and so the CUPS Snap can be loaded from the Snap Store and is immediately ready to use! Also everything what the CUPS Snap had as a patch is now incorporated upstream in CUPS, so the Snap does not apply any patches any more nor does it do manipulations on the CUPS source code with sed. Renamed CUPS slots to standard cups and cups-control, removed slots: [cups-control, cups] line from cupsd app definition, make the included command line tools work without needing a Snap-internal interface connection, do not call snapctl on administrative inquiries from the same Snap’s tools, load CUPS source code from GitHub master to not need to wait for the 2.4.0 release to have the Snap free of patches, updated to QPDF 10.3.1 plus several smaller fixes and documentation updates.
  • PostScript Printer Application: Found and fixed some crashers after a user tested it.
  • CUPS: Reviewed and discussed Michael Sweet’s addition of AirPrint and Mopria support (as a server). It is merged now and with this included in the CUPS Snap. The support is much more complete than with my primitive patch in former versions of the CUPS Snaps and the Debian package of CUPS. Now you can print on a CUPS-shared printer from iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, …), phones with Mopria app installed and Windows 10 clients. Great to be free of Apple now and able to add features again, especially approaching the new printing architecture. CUPS 2.4.0 gets close.
  • Calls for Testing of CUPS Snap: Both on Discourse and on the Snapcraft Forum I got feedback and several likes., especially that systemctl mask is the trick to get rid of the original, classically installed CUPS without uninstalling it.
  • CUPS Snap in the snapd environment: On @jamesh’s pull request to make cups an implicit interface of the system discussed auto-connection of the cups interface and came to the conclusion that it is only safe when the confined Snap’s cups plug connects to the CUPS Snap’s cups slot, as the Snap always has a cupsd doing Snap mediation, whereas classically installed cupsd has Snap mediation only from Hirsute on and not in other, non-Ubuntu distributions.
  • PAPPL: With a lot of testing of the PostScript Printer Application posted two new bug reports, one because queue names of only digits are always rejected as already existing names and one as the Mopria app on a phone does not show a “Print Test Page” button for printers of Printer Applications. Michael Sweet is investigating.
  • QPDF: Synced 10.3.1 from Debian into Hirsute.
  • sane-airscan: Still waiting for the MIR to get reviewed by the security team. Feature Freeze for Hirsute has passed, and I had posted the MIR in time for Groovy already.
  • Google Summer of Code 2021: The Linux Foundation got accepted as mentoring organization. Invited 26 mentors for all the posted projects of the different workgroups (probably even more mentors to come). Continued mentoring candidates on working on cups-filters and CUPS GitHub issues as part of the selection process.
  • Laptop refresh: My Lenovo X1 Nano arrived!! Setting it up right now … Switched back to X.org…
  • Bugs.
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