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.
Dug into the deep depths of X11 window management to find a solution to making Flutter apps look good on the common case but also work in traditional X window managers.
Reviewed Flutter PRs (there’s an increasing amount of people proposing changes to the Linux code - good sign!).
sponsored the ubiquity slideshow updates for 20.10
did a small fix to the chromium apport script to adapt to the profile directory change
started organising work around the installer refresh plans
backported a telepathy-idle patch pointed out in the distributor list fix truncated userlists in polari IRC, included another fix and updated the package to build with python3
ported the versions script to python3, did some cleanups and improvements on the way. The update couldn’t be rolled out though due to the production machine still being on an old Ubuntu serie and missing python3 depends…
PostScript Printer Application: Simplified process to extract driver data (mainly IPP options) from the PPD file and to convert options supplied with jobs into corresponding PPD options, implemented call of filter functions from libcupsfilters to process the jobs. Made it building and debugging it currently. Made it also available to Michael Sweet, the former GSoC students and our GSoD doc writer.
sane-airscan: Groovy is about to be released on Thursday and the MIR for sane-airscan did not get reviewed by the security team, so I assume it will make it into main only in 21.04 (but this is still LTS - 2, so enough time for testing and maturing).
CUPS upstream: Michael Sweet has committed a lot of changes to the fork on OpenPrinting. I will commit our distro patches (at least a part of them) there soon. In case that Apple really stopped on CUPS this will be the new upstream home of CUPS, with Michael and me as the maintainers.
Linux Foundation Mentorship Program: Mentoring the two IPP Scan students (Client, Server). Michael Sweet suggests to do sanboxable scanner drivers (Scanner Applications) using eSCL instead of IPP Scan as eSCL is used by the scanner industry and a client (sane-airscan) is already there. I agreed with him an made suggestions how to continue the project appropriately.
Google Season of Docs 2020: Mentoring our technical writer, doing corrections. Reviewed another Pull Request, this time about snapping Printer Applications.
I put together Mutter MR !1508 as an attempt to fix this. It still needs some testing to verify that the fix is correct.
D-Bus name and desktop file for Snap session agent:
Zygmunt has been working on adding desktop notifications to snapd to notify the user when a snap upgrade is blocked because the application is currently running.
I put together snapd PR #9497 to help with this by having the session agent (which would be sending the notifications) acquire a bus name and install a matching desktop file. This would be required to support the new GNOME 3 desktop notifications protocol (which is built on D-Bus activatable desktop entries), and allow management of those notifications through the GNOME’s notifications settings.
With snapd directly presenting UI to graphical users, this brings up the question of localisation. Snapd is pretty good about marking strings for translation, but hasn’t been good at uploading up to date PO templates to Launchpad (last version appears to be from 2018), and relies solely on Ubuntu language packs for distribution (so no translations on non-Ubuntu systems). That’s something we’ll probably need to help fix up.
Ubuntu Core desktop prototype:
In the pursuit of getting a confined desktop session running out of the box, I’ve been looking at trying to get the image built with a custom snapd containing my D-Bus activation changes (which haven’t landed yet). Still working on this, with the last try seeing the seeded snapd replaced by the one from the store soon after boot.
I’ve also updated the build scripts to modify the gadget.yaml file when we update and repack the pc gadget snap. This lets us turn on the experimental snapd features we need, and will let us auto-connect the interfaces needed by our confined desktop session.
Gnome Shell and friends:
Other:
Bug tracking:
firefox
chromium
other