Desktop Team Updates - Monday 19th April 2021

Desktop Team Updates
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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 12th April 2021

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  • CUPS Snap: Following the suggestion of @kenvandine upgraded the base Snap from core18 to core20. In addition to the usual changes for the new autotools plugin I needed to introduce a layout to make fontconfig working under core20 (thanks for the valuable hint, @kenvandine). Also restricted the build architectures to the actually supported ones: amd64, arm64, and armhf and upgraded the built-in Ghostscript to 9.54.
  • PostScript Printer Application: Following the CUPS Snap also switched to core20 and restricted build architectures also here. Updated the built-in QPDF to 10.3.1 and Ghostscript to 9.54 and also did some clean-up in snapcraft.yaml.
  • PAPPL: After some break Michael Sweet continued working on PAPPL and fixed many of the bugs which I reported and affected the PostScript Printer Application. Tested the fixes locally and finally hit the “Trigger new build” button on the PostScript Printer Application in the Snap Store to make a version containing these fixes available to the users (currently open and closed issues of PAPPL).
  • cups-filters: Added Mohit Mohan’s GSoC 2020 work on multi-threading in cups-browsed (Mohit’s final report, Mohit’s code). Due to a lot of work having been done on cups-browsed after GSoC 2020 I had to merge manually, with this commit as the result. This makes cups-browsed much faster in creating the local CUPS queues and this way it works much better especially if there are many printers in the network. Also the raise of the timeout for cups-browsed assigning a destination printer to a job which was done earlier contributes.
  • sane-airscan: Finally!! Two days before Final Freeze of Hirsute the MIR got resolved and sane-airscan made it into Main. Thanks to @alexmurray for reviewing the fixes of upstream author Alexander Pevzner and also thanks to @paelzer and @didrocks. Fixed version is 0.99.25-0ubuntu1. This will make the scanners in most modern multi-function printers, plus some stand-alone models (like Canon LIDE 300) work with Hirsute out-of-the-box.
  • sane-backends: Uploaded 1.0.32-0ubuntu2 adding a Recommends: sane-airscan to the libsane1 binary package to pull sane-airscan into the standard installation of Hirsute and to complete the MIR. Thanks to @vorlon for untangling the -proposed migration, making it ignore failures on the flaky gscan2pdf tests.
  • Google Summer of Code 2021: All 5 promising proposals for OpenPrinting got actually finally submitted. One student will work on a network devices panel for GNOME Control Center and already posted an appropriate issue on GNOME.
  • Google Season of Docs 2021: The OpenPrinting project of documentation for cups-filters and also the other projects of the Linux Foundation did not get accepted.
  • Bugs.
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  • hirsute
    • fixed the pygobject build by backporting tests fixes for the new glib serie
    • fixed the mirror selection dialog in software-properties being broken with python3.9
    • reuploaded webkitgtk with the newly adding Depends on the xdg portals reverted which fixed the armhf autopkgtests
  • snaps
    • fixed gnome-mahjongg build
    • fix quadrapassel build
    • updated thunderbird beta to 880b3
  • sponsoring
  • dashboard
    • started working on integrating SRU verification needed to the version reports
  • other
    • one day off
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firefox24 firefox

thunderbird24 thunderbird

chromium22 chromium

  • updated beta then stable to 90.0.4430.72
    • need to investigate a renderer crash in the snap on i386 (not promoted to stable)

flutter24 flutter

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  • My first +1 maintenance shift where I worked on pygobject, python-barbicanclient, gnucash, gsimplecal, indicator-power, pidgin-sipe, and pan. Thanks @seb128 for all of your help!!
  • cherrytree: updated the release in the upstream yaml, and a new build is ongoing to release this to candidate
  • cherrytree: also revived the effort to snap the new cherrytree C++ code port (from python2.7). Discovered I needed a newer glibmm than was in the gnome-3-38 build snap so updated that and am going to try with a new platform snap.
  • glimpse: fixed all 3 snaps locally with various updates needed and submitted 3 PRs for the 3 different branches but the windows build is failing for some reason so working with the upstream devs to fix.
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  • Continued to write docs for the new autopkgtest-cloud branch in between other tasks, getting there now
  • Some release status meetings, getting things in line for this week
  • Currently mostly full time on the release
  • Met with the Launchpad team to be semi-interviewed about release/archive team workflows and any issues
  • Did quite a few test installs on real hardware to try to pre-find any serious installer bugs
  • Got some things to migrate before final freeze
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snapd:

snapcraft:

  • I created snapcraft PR #3504, that makes some changes to how the desktop extensions configure fontconfig. This ensures that application snaps can see the fonts provided by the platform snap (useful to ensure we don’t end up with no fonts), and removes some spurious configuration includes.
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GNOME

  • More work in the Gjs GObject memory fixes MR
  • Fixed handling of registered state for GApplication MR

Packaging

  • Uploaded nautilus with a GApplication related crash fix
  • Uploaded gjs 1.68.0-1 to debian experimental (but not synced as I discovered the mentioend deadlock)
  • Reiteration over the gnome-shell-extension-appindicator focal SRU
  • Fixed a minor smartcard profile issue on gdm (causing users not being matched on card insertion) and uploaded to debian (hirsute is queued too)
  • Snapped Joplin CLI
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