Desktop Team Updates - Monday 18th May 2020

[vanvugt]

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.

Last week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates - Monday 11th May 2020

[vanvugt]

Gnome Shell and friends:

• The ongoing fix for slightly blurry desktop wallpaper:
  • Made more changes to satisfy more upstream reviews.
  • Landed upstream in mutter 3.37.2
• Minor updates in: clutter/cogl: Query pending_swaps instead of counting them
• Work in progress: Fade the overview out/in over the background actor tree
  • Tried to redesign window groups to resolve existing discussions. With limited success. On hold again until I have more time.
• Looked into the top gnome-shell crash for focal: xcb_io.c:260: poll_for_event: Assertion `!xcb_xlib_threads_sequence_lost’’ failed:
  • Proposed a fix upstream and it’s already landed on master and in 3.36.3, 3.34.7.
• SRU verification for the 3.36.2 updates in focal (mutter, gnome-shell)
• More positive progress in triaging known gnome-shell leaks.

Housekeeping:

• Still very busy with bug traffic. People continue to love focal a lot.
• Some unexpected git maintenance for pulseaudio; after a proposed focal update got lost and superseded. And the same issue in bionic.
• Migrated my development machine to groovy.

Backlog tracking

[didrocks]

ZSys:

• Wrote blog posts part 6-7-8-9 and second pass done! The whole work on ZFS 20.04 LTS is now covered. We will publish them over time (and hint them here).
• Fix issues and formulations on blog post part 5
• Read some documentation on luks and the proposal for encryption integration on 20.10 drafted by jibel.
• Bugs triaging (we are mostly in good shape)

[hellsworth]

• tested Rico’s LO help bug fix - thanks @ricotz and @seb128 for your help here! we’ll ship this fix with LO 6.4.4 this week
• cherrytree - some minor changes and looked into fixing spell check… still some changes are needed to make python-enchant find hunspell-en-us
• met with network-manager snap team… poking around with the network-manager 1.22 snap

[oSoMoN]

firefox

• 76.0.1 was published by the security team to all supported releases
• fixed s390x build failure on groovy to get 76.0.1 to migrate, and backported the fix to other affected releases

thunderbird

• updated thunderbird to 68.8.0 (including a fix for FIPS mode by Dariusz), and handed over to the security team for publication to xenial, bionic, eoan and focal
• started test builds of thunderbird 77 beta, in anticipation of 78 becoming the next stable series, and found a number of issues that I’ll need to iron out in the coming weeks

chromium

• 81.0.4044.138 was published as a security update to xenial and bionic
• Got some feedback on the VAAPI support in the snap: while it worked in my tests some users reported that it didn’t with newer hardware. I am now rebuilding a snap in the candidate/vaapi channel that builds and stages a more recent libva than what’s in the 18.04 archive, along with the latest releases of intel-vaapi-driver and intel-media-driver
• along the way I found out that chromium failed to build against a custom libva, so I submitted fixes upstream

[seb128]

• Worked only 3 days this week
• Debugged a lshw translation issue
• yet another busy weeks on launchpad bugs triaging
• updated/SRUed the new GTK stable update
• investigated a gnome-clocks sound regression, it’s due to valac
• verified a stack of focal desktop SRUs
• backported a gamemode fix to revert to the previous cpu governor and not always ‘powersave’
• investigated a snap-store translation issue
• updated the thunderbird snap to the current version
• sponsored the desktop icons bugfix update from Marco
• sponsored the pulseaudio fixed SRU versions from Daniel
• commited the workaround from Gunnar for evince translations to Debian

[kenvandine]

Snap Store:

• Many apps have no icon in Software on Focal - Bug 1864307
• snap-store declares support for application/vnd.flatpak.ref but doesn’t actually support them - Bug 1875634
• Yaru icons are not shown in Gnome-Software - Bug 1866134

Desktop Integration:

• Fonts are poorly rendered in Wayland session, confirmed bug - Bug 1871779
• Snap testing on other distros: Arch, Centos 7 & 8, Debian, Linux Mint, and Fedora
  • Verified the snap private fontcache fix in inkscape works in all these distros

[till-kamppeter]

• Snapcraft/CUPS Snap: Further work on the Snap: I am coming closer to have all needed features and fixes done to make the standard CUPS in a distro. Especially filters and backends called by the CUPS daemon are dropping privileges again, but as user “snap_saemon” instead of “lp”, we use CUPS itself and not lsof to check whether there is already a classic CUPS on the system, dropped a lot of modifications on CUPS, and made cupsctl actually working.
• snapd: @jdstrand told that he will work on the new CUPS interfaces this week.
• PAPPL: Michael Sweet has accepted first pull requests to PAPPL from the GSoC students, for printer discovery and job handling.
• ippusbxd: I intended to release 0.35 with the fix for the crasher bug (upstream bug report), but there is also a bug on scanner discovery for which I want to include the fix.
• Google Summer of Code 2020: Some students already started coding, first pull requests accepted by Michael Sweet into PAPPL.
• Google Season of Docs 2020: The Linux Foundation got accepted as one of 50 mentoring organizations! We have lined up and registered 19(!) mentors, so more than enough for the up to 4 project slots we can get as an umbrella organization. For OpenPrinting we want to get a tutorial on designing and packaging printer/scanner drivers as Printer Application Snaps written, for hardware manufacturers doing it the right way with the new architecture.
• OpenPrinting Summit and PWG Meeting (virtual event): We have a nice summary of the event now.
• OpenPrinting: Monthly phone meeting and OpenPrinting News.
• Bugs.

[laney]

• Spent a decent amount of time working with Canonical IS due to some problems in the clouds we use for running autopkgtests.
• Reduced the number of Ubuntu’s britney commits by merging and dropping some.
• Started rebasing those remaining commits on top of Debian; hard work, since the codebase has changed a lot in the 3 years.
• Sponsored Yaru + SRU for Marco.
• Discussed a reboot of the +1 maintenance team.

[jamesh]

snapd D-Bus activation

• Updated snapd PR #6258 (D-Bus activation support) to be compatible with the landed user daemons support.
• With user daemons landed, I updated the PR to require that D-Bus activation require the app to be a daemon, since this now workable for session services.
• This change seemed to work fine everywhere except Ubuntu 14.04, where its systemd is too old. The snapd devs seem okay with this provided that installing such a snap on 14.04 fails early.

snapd theme support:

• I’ve started work on a service to help users install theme snaps to match their selected GTK, icon, cursor, or sound theme.
• At present, I’ve got some code using GtkSettings to monitor the theme names and detect changes (we don’t want to use GSettings here, since different desktop environments store the data in different locations), and some code using snapd-glib to detect what themes are currently available by enumerating available content interface slots and checking what directory names they export.
• Still to do is some code to check whether a snap is available for missing themes, and some UI to let the user trigger the installation.

[3v1n0]

Upstream work

• Some reviews in dash-to-dock and indicators-icons (under testing for SRU)
• Debugging gjs under s390x, trying to figure out why some testing fails [issue]
• Upstream gjs reviews
• Refactor gjs code to use more type-safe and modern C++ code to handle C-to-js values conversions [MR]
• Some fixes and cleanups to desktop icons [MR]
• Some updates to the mutter 2-in-1 orientation fixes branch [MR]
• libfprint upstream reviews

Packaging stuff

• SRU verifications
• Prepared new SRU bugs for desktop icons
  • New debian version with upstream fixes and SRU it.
• Updates to libfprint-tod package to include various upstream fixes, waiting for some more testing with Didier to proceed relasing.