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.
We also have our weekly meeting on IRC. We meet on Tuesday at 13:30 UTC in #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode. There will be an “Any Other Business” section at the end where you are welcome to raise topics. These topics might be discussed during the meeting, or afterwards depending on the time, depth of conversation, topic and so on.
Discussion with upstream about different GPU frequency scaling solutions. Roughly agreed on a plan for what v2 might look like (and doesn’t leave Wayland behind like v1 does).
Performance testing more fixes in 3.37 for consideration in 3.36. The only one I can find that’s major, backportable, and missing is the Nvidia latency fix. But I’ll need to write a new 3.36 version.
dove into armhf autopkgtest failures. discovered it’s two tests that keep failing but need system logs when crash occurs. so setup old rpi 3B+ with groovy to run the failing armhf autopkgtests. But then lxd keeps running out of space (and i spent a while messing around with volumes and pools as a result). Tried the same on the new rpi 4 too with no change. so i disabled the tests and launched a build but dropped 6.4.5 in favor of focusing on 7.0.
There’s a gap as noted in the first MP, hopefully will get that closed soon.
As mentioned ^-, did some work on Libreoffice trying to help with getting it to migrate to groovy - this worked in the end and we got a big ICU transition migrated. Now attempting to find out if there’s a gcc-10 regression so we can get help from the maintainer of that if we need to.
Small-ish autopkgtest work, helped with Julian getting hwrng support turned on (actually changes I worked on last year) - but it’s missing in one of the clouds still so can’t be fully used yet.
ipp-usb: Posted MIR to get it the default IPP-over-USB implementation in Groovy. ippusbxd is deprecated now as ipp-usb is much more reliable and also the ChromeOS developers have written their own tool due to the problems of ippusbxd.
sane-airscan: Posted MIR to get this the standard SANE backend for driverless scanning in Groovy. Compared to the formerly used snae-escl backend in SANE it supports not only the eSCL scanning protocol but also WSD, and it supports automatic document feeders (ADF). We will soon add IPP Scan support to sane-airscan, to be available in Ubuntu H. H. (21.04).
Google Summer of Code 2020: Continued mentoring work, answered student’s questions, explained them what is needed, … One of the students is now working on converting filters to filter functions in cups-filters, the other on turning Gutenprint into a Printer Application.
Linux Foundation Mentorship Program: Our first 2 students are coding. The one on fax support has nearly completed to add IPP Fax Out support to the driverless. The other student is installing proprietary Epson printer drivers in a chroot for testing. We are interviewing IPP Scan students to start next month.
Linux Plumber’s Conference 2020 (Virtual): Set up the schedules for the OpenPrinting micro-conference on Friday, August 28, 2pm to 6pm UTC. And because the event is all virtual I received a speaker gift package containing video conference equipment (headphones, webcam, LED lights) and as surprise a Libre Computer AML-S805X-AC (+ eMMC 5.x 8GB) single-board computer. Set it up with the manufacturer’s Ubuntu 18.04.
Gnome Shell and friends:
Bug tracking: