Desktop Team Updates - Monday 15th November 2021

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 November 2021

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  • WSL
    • Rebranded WSL applications.
    • PoC of systemd on WSL at startup of an instance.
  • General
    • Hiring.
    • Documentation on ubuntu-report.
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Desktop Installer

WSL OOBE

Other

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  • WSL
    • Rebranded WSL applications.
    • PoC of systemd on WSL at startup of an instance.
    • Multiple reviews on subiquity, ubuntu-desktop-installer…
  • MIR
    • libportal second review and ACK
    • wireplumber MIR review, needs some answers
    • reviewed/comments on the incoming Rust policy for MIR
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  • LO 7.2.3.1 snap - built, tested, released
  • giving interviews
  • learning about the internals of our data collection and analytics from JB
  • Continuing to update gnome snaps. I’m trying to bring all the snaps to a happy place and keeping track of that on an internal spreadsheet
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GNOME

  • Working on the dock to get various of fixes ready:
    • Support for GNOME 41
    • Refactored daniel’s fixes for upstream usage (and to avoid patching the shell)
    • Refactored the locations support to make it more async (was causing icons not to show)
    • Prepared dock fixes in Yaru

Canonical

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firefox24 firefox

thunderbird24 thunderbird

  • 78.14.0 (final release of that series) was sponsored to bionic, focal and hirsute
  • preparing updates to the 91 series for bionic, focal and hirsute

snapcraft24 snaps

flutter24 Ubuntu Desktop Installer

package24 other

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  • Ubuntu
    • did GNOME updates and merges
    • tested snapd candidate fix for nvidia EGL issues on newer ubuntu series
    • wrote the MIR for wireplumber, new dependency of pipewire. Reworked the MIR later since the template changed
    • reported a wireplumber Debian bug about not recommending pipewire-pulse which leads to pipewire taking over pulseaudio
    • Reverted our patches to not use fuse3 since the MIR has been acked now
    • removed the power-profiles-daemon autopkgtest since changes made it not work out of build tree and upstream’s opinion is that it’s not useful as an installed test, unblocked proposed migration
    • wrote a patch to workaround the transmission ftbfs with the new autoconf version and forwarded to Debian
    • investigated a bit why the amd64 current ISO was outdated, turned out the machine used for validation hasn’t been online for some days, jibel reported it to IS and it has been resolved now
  • New Desktop Installer
    • updated the installer snap to not build only on amd64 and fixed the build on other architectures
    • fixed the ubuntu-desktop-wizard weblate configuration to get github PRs working
  • Snaps
    • switched the thunderbird snaps to lzo compression
    • updated thunderbird beta to 95.0b2 and later 95.0b3 and stable to 91.3.1
    • add libpci to the thunderbird snap stage packages to fix a glx warning on start but to work correctly it needs extra permission, since thunderbird doesn’t really need it for anything reverted
    • did some maintainance on GNOME snaps, rebuilds for CVE fixes in staged packages, version update, promoted candiate versions
    • deleted some GNOME snap master builds since those are not maintained, update the versions definitions to reflect the changes
    • pushed a build fix to gnome-3-34-1804-sdk, the new meson errors out on invalid options now
  • Sponsoring
    • valac minor version update from ricotz
    • uploaded build fixes from ricotz for the new poppler
  • Reports
    • fix the wrong gnome ext version being display for snaps !stable series
  • Others
    • interviews for the open desktop position
    • reported a bug against snaps-review-tools erroring out a on a decode error on the edge gtk themes, which got fixed already!
    • organized the start of cycle merges
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WSL:

  • Had the locale setup feature merged into Subiquity.

  • Debugged system_setup issue in reconf reported by @jpnurmi.

  • Working on the launcher side of the reboot/shutdown feature.

  • At next, server side clean-up and simplification, like removing the user from wsl.conf.

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  • CUPS Snap: Waiting for @ijohnson’s pull request on snapd for the cups printing interface to get merged by the snapd team.
  • CUPS: Upstream version 2.4rc1 got released, release candidate for the first feature release of CUPS on OpenPrinting. Jammy Jellyfish will have a 2.4.x CUPS version, most probably the CUPS Snap.
  • cups-filters: Tested the new universal CUPS filter and fixed several bugs: Forgotten bannertopdf()(commit) and its MIME rule (commit), added CUPS conversion rule file (commit), make universal not fail if the filter chain turns out to be empty (commit), use log function (commit). Also added way to silence the driverless utility by environment variable so that the Legacy Printer Application can suppress its report of driverless printers (commit). Currently debugging the pdftopdf() filter functions as it has problems with N-up (several pages shrinked and put onto a single sheet) and different print-scaling settings.
  • pappl-retrofit: Introduced the new Legacy Printer Application, which makes all CUPS drivers classically installed on the system available in a Printer Application. This way legacy printer drivers which cannot be converted to Printer Applications (like proprietary manufacturer drivers) can be used with the CUPS Snap or the future CUPS 3.x (more info). Also now verifying and correcting the resolution when loading settings of an existing print queue on startup, to avoid a crash when on an update of the Printer Application the driver of the queue was removed or modified and so the saved resolution does not exist any more in the new version (commit), fixed a crasher in job processing, with Raster input and simple PostScript PPD files (commit, this was the first bug report on pappl-retrofit).
  • Retro-fitting Printer Applications/OpenPrinting: Further testing, optimizing, and debugging on listing the supported printers and finding the best support for a given printer. The state-of-the-art is written up here.
  • OpenPrinting: While adding the Brother HL-2130 to the OpenPrinting database (so that the Ghostscript Printer Application auto-assigns this model) after a user’s report I have found a bug on the new OpenPrinting web server and fixed it.
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: Now it is published for everyone: GSoC 2022 will be more flexible also allowing non-students to code, 2 project sizes to choose from, and flexibility in the coding time period.
  • OpenPrinting: November News Post with an overview of the 4 Printer Applications providing all printer drivers which are available as Debian packages in Printer Applications, the Legacy Printer Application, release announcements, …
  • Bugs.
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