Desktop Team Updates – Monday 16th January 2023

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 9th January 2023.

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  • Did the upstream GNOME 42.8 release
  • Prepared Nautilus 43.2 as an SRU for Ubuntu 22.10. This update fixes lots of regressions and reintroduces the 67% (64px) zoom level
  • Updated my primary work computer to Lunar
  • Uploaded Nautilus 44 Alpha to Lunar. Biggest change is that the “Expandable Folders in List View” feature is back. This required updating GTK4 and libadwaita to their GNOME 44 Alpha versions.
  • Uploaded gnome-control-center 44 Alpha to Lunar. Biggest change is that Ubuntu is no longer disabling the Device Security panel, as the panel is now much simpler than the 43 version.
  • Both of these packages haven’t built yet because of unrelated archive build issues from debhelper and protobuf
  • I expect Lunar to generally not get GNOME 44 stuff until GNOME 44 Beta a month from now.
  • Got last minute approval for the poppler 22.12 transition in Debian. Debian has now entered the first phase of the freezes (transition freeze) in prepartion for the release of Debian 12 later this year.
  • Discovered that NO_AT_BRIDGE=1 recently stopped working for GTK4 apps so we need to use GTK_A11Y=none there instead.
  • Submitted a bugfix in response to cpdb-libs being packaged in Debian slightly differently than in Ubuntu
  • Worked with Heather on updating blueprint-compiler
  • Reported a dh-python issue when a package tries to depend on python3 >= 3.10
  • Tried pinging ftpmasters more to appeal the text-engine package being stuck in Debian NEW for 6 months. This is blocking Debian from getting a newer GNOME Shell Extension Manager version. But I’ve not gotten any response this time or previous attempts when I’ve tried asking about this package.
  • gjs 1.74 built with mozjs102 is now available in the -proposed repo for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. This is a major upgrade. Give it a try and report if you notice any issues.

Other News

  • gtg is back in Debian and Ubuntu
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Installer

Workshops

Other

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WSL

Windows Subsystem for Linux

  • Finally! Github actions to run your tests on WSL are available using Azure. Ubuntu/WSL #337. Check out this README if you’re interested in having automated workflows on WSL for your software. Hit me up or open an issue on Ubuntu/WSL if you need any help.
  • Small followup to the previous point WSL #346

GoWSL

A module to interface with WSL via Go

  • Started and almost finished workflow using the aforementioned Github actions on WSL GoWSL #10.
  • GoWSL now supports getting and setting a default distro. (Implementation and bugfix).
  • Small improvements in testing GoWSL #19
  • Small improvements in error messages GoWSL #15
  • Small improvements in README GoWSL #13
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yaru-widgets

  • navigate back when re-selecting an entry on the master-detail/navigation page #473
  • add a small test page for that #474

software-store

  • minor performance improvements #721, #767
  • implement master-detail/navigation page changes from yaru-widgets #723
  • rebase @oSoMon’s PR that cancels background update checks when the user opens a package’s detail page (PackageKit can’t do those things in parallel) #743
  • add a new integration test that installs and uninstalls a snap #735 (most of the work went into making this work in the github CI)
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firefox24 firefox

  • tested several extensions that use native messaging [through xdg-desktop-portal] with firefox stable snap to assess the status of the portal and the in-review patches
  • looked into the status of bugzilla #1790496 again and patches for it elsewhere
  • investigated recent firefox nightly snap build failures (now fixed)

misc

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  • sponsored oem alsa-ucm-conf fixes for AMP-ALC1318 speakers and rt715 microphone
    (l/k/j)
  • fixed the gtksourceview4 autopkgtests in Debian and synced to Ubuntu
  • sponsored oem libinput fixes for touchpad issues on Dell Precision5680 (j/k/l)
  • sorted out the publishing of the edge snap of firefox (it was still using Olivier’s personal token which didn’t have the needed permissions anymore)
  • resolved the weblate translations for the flutter software being locked due to a rebase conflict
  • SRUed a change to gdk-pixbuf/kinetic to increase the jpg loader limit for 100M to 1G to fix eog and others failing to load high resolution images
  • update the livepatch integration in update-manager for the new ubuntu pro based interfaces
  • updated the thunderbird deb to 102.6.1 on the different series and uploaded to the security team ppa, it still needs to be tested and validated before being uploaded to the archive
  • reviewed, tweaked and uploaded the conversion of the telegram-desktop deb to a snap on upstream request. The deb is outdated and buggy
  • reviewed and merged a contribution to the has-signed-canonical-cla github action to add a parameter to list bot accounts to whitelist
  • reviewed the gnome-initial-setup livepatch/ubuntu pro work from Nathan
  • pydrive got accepted in Debian, synced to Ubuntu
  • updated deja-dup in Debian to install pydrive on demand, we are back in sync now
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  • cups-filters: To get the full capabilities of a driverless IPP printer, a client (CUPS, driverless utility) need to poll the attributes all and media-col-database with a get-printer-attributes IPP request (media-col-database is not included in all as it is often a very long list). Some printers cannot cope with the two being polled in a single request. Added separate polling of the two to work around this, and also parsing the media-col-ready attribute know, to lower chances to overlook something (like borderless printing support). In addition made sure that the LICENSE file is included in all source tarballs. For working out the best way for the update of Debian and Ubuntu to cups-filters 2.x with @seb128, created a PPA with the Debian packages of the 2.0b2 upstream versions. Does not yet build completely as we still need to solve the problem of the old libppd in Ubuntu. Debian renamed the old libppd to libppd-legacy in Experimental.
  • Common Print Dialog Backends (CPDB): All the components (cpdb-libs, cpdb-backend-cups, and cpdb-backend-file) got introduced into Debian Unstable, still 1.x versions though, for 2.x libcupsfilters needs to get updated to 2.x first. Updated the MIR for cpdb-libs to the current MIR scheme.
  • PAPPL scanning support: Video meeting with GSoC-2022 contributor Rishabh Maheshwari, mentor Deepak Patankar, and the new volunteer/GSoC candidate on completing the scanning support.
  • Braille Printer Application: Helped GSoC-2022 contributor Chandresh Soni to fix a bug in his Pull Request to upstreamize the Braille Printer Application.
  • Google Summer of Code 2023: Started preparing the mentoring organization application for the Linux Foundation, creating the project ideas pages, the main page and the sub-pages for each workgroup linked from there. Asked the mentors to enter this year’s project ideas into their pages, wrote up also 9 project ideas for OpenPrinting and discussed them with Michael Sweet. In addition continued assigning GitHub issues to contributor candidates and mentored them on working on the issues.
  • OpenPrinting: Monthly video meeting.
  • Bugs.
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