Desktop Team Updates - Monday 18th April 2022

Desktop Team Updates
8
  • CUPS Snap: The promotion of snapd 2.55.3 into the stable channel is planned for today! The bugs I have mentioned last week are fixed, only the problem of the “sticky” environment (you need to run snap-discard-ns on all your installed Snaps to get it update after the snapd update) still persists and I have no news from @mvo about that yet. Taking into account that you can already use the new cups interface. See instructions in my April news post.
  • cups-filters: continued with fixes and enhancements towards the cups-filters 2.x release: After having fixed the known bugs and renamed everything to have a nice API, I came to the next step: How do we have a libcupsfilters without any PPD file support to use a s distro package in a system with CUPS 3.x? But how still be able to install a (non-snapped, DEB package) retro-fitting Printer Application in such a system without needing to replace libcupsfilters by a differently built variant (is this possible in distros?) which supports PPDs, without needing a libcupsfilters generally supporting PPDs (and we all wanted to get rid of them)? So I thought out a design change in cups-filters: Currently the filter functions support PPDs, libcupsfilters depends on libppd, I will remove the PPD support from the filter functions, making libcupsfilters independent of PPDs and libppd, create wrapper filter functions in libppd overtaking the PPD support and calling the original filter function. So dependencies get reversed, libppd depends on libcupsfilters and libppd provides the PPD-supporting set of filter functions, libcupsfilters the PPD-free set, and that without code duplications. Now I am turning this idea into code. In addition I made the ghostscript() filter function output grayscale PCLm and raster PDF with appropriate jobs and/or printers and also require Ghostscript 9.56.0 in cups-filters 2.x now.
  • Retro-fitting Printer Application Snaps: Updated all the 4 driver-retro-fitting Printer Applications and the CUPS Snap to Ghostscript 9.56.1 (security fix) and also updated the HPLIP Printer Application to HPLIP 3.22.2 (Release notes) and in addition the PostScript Printer Application and the Ghostscript Printer Application to HPLIP 3.22.2, too, for contained PostScript PPDs and hpijs driver for non-HP PCL laser printers.
  • Easter Egg in Jammy - OR - Canon CR3 RAW support finally in Ubuntu!: I have read @jbicha’s update on Monday (Easter Monday) and he wrote that he has fixed libexiv2 in Jammy to actually support Canon’s CR3 RAW format, the format used by the most recent camera models. So I tried it out right away, with the files of my Canon PowerShot G5X Mark II (the small camera which I have always in my pocket, also on the Sprint in Frankfurt) and it works! In Jammy DarkTable, RawTherapee, and digiKam all open the CR3 files now and you can edit them! Also spread the news to the photo community on DPReview. Thanks, @jbicha.
  • Linux Application Summit 2022: @local-optimum has brought in the idea of having a Jammy release party on the LAS. @bwyazel, @hellsworth, and me discussed this and we came to the conclusion to make both a virtual and and a physical release party, most probably on Sat, April 29, tonight (CEST), after the conference day. Also made an announcement in the April News Post on OpenPrinting.
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: All contributor candidates who we have onboarded in the OpenPrinting community have given me their proposals for review and after my review they have submitted them to Google. If all works fine (we get enough slots, all contributors complete their projects, …) we will get most of the work done for the New Architecture!
  • OpenPrinting: Posted the April News Post. Special features this month are: LAS 2022 announcement, Updated testing and bug workaround instructions for the cups snapd interface, AppImage and Printing. Tons of fixes for cups-filters 2.0.
  • Bugs.
2 Likes