Desktop Team Updates - Monday 22nd August 2022

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 15th August 2022

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  • Finished the Nautilus 43 transition in Ubuntu 22.10
  • Updated the GNOME Shell gsconnect extension for Nautilus 43 compatibility
  • The extension is also in Debian now.
  • Uploaded new versions of File Roller and GNOME Terminal to Debian Experimental and Ubuntu 22.10. These provide the only third-party Nautilus extensions that work with Nautilus 43 so far except for extensions using nautilus-python.
     
  • Currently running the gnome-desktop transition in Debian. I had several complaints the first day about the temporary installability problems on Debian Unstable for this transition. Ubuntu development releases shield users from this by keeping things in -proposed until they pass basic installability checks and autopkgtests. Debian has Testing but a lot of people prefer Unstable. I think Ubuntu’s system is significantly better here.
  • Finally got the wrong version of librest removed from Debian Experimental which was a blocker to doing the mega GNOME43 transition in Debian.
     
  • Noticed that GTK4 was failing to build (actually worse: it built on riscv64 but not on other architectures which caused dependency skew blocking things that depend on GTK4 from building on riscv64 so all those things would have been stuck in kinetic-proposed). Earlier, Simon spent a lot of effort trying to understand the issue and figured out that the build test failures were caused by mesa. So I asked for a new mesa release to be packaged early for 22.10 which fixed the issue.
  • Uploaded GTK4 4.7 (4.8 Beta) to Ubuntu 22.10. I intend to push this to Debian Unstable in a few days.
     
  • Cherry-picked a fix from the Debian Firefox ESR packaging to fix the armhf build on mozjs91. But mozjs102 continues to FTBFS on armhf which is interfering with us switching gjs to use it.
  • Uploaded NetworkManager 1.40 RC (1.39.90) to Ubuntu 22.10 but it’s blocked because of a netplan.io autopkgtest failure
     
  • Uploaded GNOME To Do 41 to Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 22.10 because I couldn’t get the older version to build. Also packaged its rename to Endeavour with the 42 version release and uploaded that to the Debian NEW queue.
  • Created a proposal to remove GNOME To Do from the Ubuntu 22.10 default install.
     
  • Uploaded a Debian GNOME metapackage update
  • Stopped building the libgda5 web provider needed as part of the ongoing libsoup3 transitions
    (https://tracker.debian.org/news/1355422/accepted-meta-gnome3-1425-source-into-unstable/)
  • Mentored Jesús and sponsored his first upload to Debian. We worked on creating patches for the Nautilus transition and preparing other .deb packaging fixes and updates for Debian and Ubuntu.
  • Did a variety of other packaging updates
  • Filed a bug about incompatibility of sbuild-launchpad-chroot with the latest schroot. Installed the older schroot version and set apt-mark hold schroot schroot-common to work around for now on my local computer.

In other news

  • Simon enabled broadwayd in GTK4 for Debian and Ubuntu 22.10
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  • Ported Nautilus patch to Gnome 43 (it enables progress bar in the dock for ongoing file transfers).
  • Worked with Jeremy and Evolution’s maintainer to track down “local draft auto-saves are not deleted” bug.
  • Minor improvements to Ubuntu Pro.
  • Verified Libnotify4 for Bionic and Focal.
  • Rjday and I are trying to figure out how to build the Chromium snap with core22.
  • Chromium snap, the VA-API quest:
    • Met with Sverdy to clarify and test.
      • Acceleration worked in his Wayland set up, though he reports a freeze in fullscreen video if accross multiple 4 K monitors.
      • Added flags (which vary depending on Wayland and Xorg) (VaapiVideoEncoder was added too) to the launcher so that the end user doesn’t need to manually provide them on CLI.
        As a consequence, testing is also quite easy now!
    • Updated merge request for the main channel.
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Desktop installer

Subiquity

flutter-snap

Flutter

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  • one work day after holidays spent mostly dealing with the backlog
  • reviewed some kinetic translation template in the launchpad import queue
  • sponsored the plymouth merge from Daniel
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snaps

Event Organizing

  • LAS: Working with freedesktop.org on mailman issues regarding mailing list. Felipe Borges submit a bid to hold LAS 2023 (from my lightning talk at GUADEC!) in Brno but the mail keeps getting dropped :confused:
  • Ubuntu Summit: Created CFP proposal
  • Worked with @kewisch to create a kudoboard for Monica (link removed). Thanks for the help and idea!

Content Creation

  • Calling all Themes two blog posts. I’ve stayed on top of addressing all comments from @jamesh , @local-optimum, and Gloria Manzanares. We’re nearly there… just a couple of changes to make this week and then Oli will post the “Snapd Desktop Integration” on ubuntu.com and the tutorial on discourse when he’s back from holiday. In this work, I found a snapd-desktop-integration bug.
  • Setup August Indaba topic on discourse.
  • In email, I lined up September Indaba topic on core22/snapcraft7/core desktop for Sept 23. Need to finalize with discourse post announcement and final lineup of attendees (Claudio and Sergio, maybe Callahan and someone for core desktop (Oli?))
  • Looking to line up release process as the topic for October 28. Need to ping some folks to make sure Oct 28 would work.

Misc

  • Meet and Greet training with Emily Tu. I had no idea this existed and it would have been really helpful a year ago when I started doing it. Still, spread the word with the desktop team and Callahan, in case they find the slides useful
  • Got handed some accessibility items from Monica, joined the Accessibility Guild to represent the Desktop needs there. Attended my first meeting and I have some investigation to do on getting brltty seeded on the ISO and look into speech to text libraries seeded as well. We need blind and deaf users to be able to install Ubuntu.
  • Circle Committee - provided thorough review of the circle app criteria in our private matrix channel.
  • Sort of ran the team meeting - it was all about celebrating Monica’s time. I forgot to press record though :slight_smile:
  • Thorough review of @till-kamppeter’s most recent OpenPrinting Post and pointed out ~70 changes to make. Great post!
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  • OpenPrinting: Now the third page of the trilogy, about what we are currently doing at OpenPrinting is ready: “What we are currently doing”! As the other two it is linked from the “About Us” page. Thanks a lot to @hellsworth for reviewing the page (see above). These three pages will be used as base and/or link target for a planned Ubuntu blog post with @local-optimum and they will also be used as onboarding material for new contributors, as already many conference slides and recordings. The page also contains links to the Indaba and the Office Hours (thanks again, @hellsworth and @madhens).
  • Printer Applications and WSL: Posted @cnihelton’s HOWTO about installing Printer Applications under WSL to support legacy printers under Windows on the OpenPrinting web site and added a link to it to the front page of the OpenPrinting web site. There was some discussion about the design of the icon, so the icon is still subject to change.
  • cups-filters: Fixed some bugs: Made the new cups-filters correctly working with the PPD files for driverless printers generated by CUPS (temporary CUPS queues and creating queues with lpadmin ... -m everywhere ...) and also with PPD files of older cups-filters 1.x versions (commit). Added NULL checks when filter functions of libppd (especially also ppdFilterExternalCUPS) are called without PPD file, to avoid crashes. This especially prevented all maintenance tasks (poll default option settings and installable accessory configuration from PostScript printers, identify printer, …) in the retro-fitting Printer Applications from working (commit, commit).
  • Common Print Dialog Backends (CPDB): Found out with GSoC contributor Gaurav Guleria that functions to set the system default printer and the user default printer need to be added to the 2.x API and that appropriate config files for the user and the systems are needed.
  • Bye-bye colord: After my talk on the GUADEC 2022 I had a hallway session with Sebastian Wick about the planned removal of colord. This mainly because Wayland manages the color profiles by itself. I discussed the printing side and continued on the OpenPrinting mailing list: My first post, containing my and Sebastian’s initial e-mails, and Michael Sweet’s answer, telling how color profiles, needed for soft-proofing are managed on IPP printers, and my follow-up.
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: Continued mentoring the 7 contributors for OpenPrinting. Usual online chats on Telegram and video meetings. And all the 7 contributors wrote nice reports for the August News Post.
  • Desktop Team Meeting: We had a great virtual good-bye party for @madhens! Also made my contribution to the Kudoboard we made for her. Thanks to @kewisch for this great idea. And thanks a lot to @madhens for all the nice work she did at Canonical. It was also so nice at the dinner after the first day of LAS 2022 which ended with my lightning talk about the Ubuntu Summit which was an enhancement of @kenvandine’s original on the Sprint in Frankfurt. She said “Till, you are stealing the show of your boss!”
  • OpenPrinting: Posted the August News Post. Special features this month are: Legacy printers under Windows, OpenPrinting micro-conference on Plumbers, Outcomes of GUADEC 2022, 2nd month of GSoC 2022.
  • Bugs.
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firefox24 firefox

chromium22 chromium

  • updated stable to 104.0.5112.101
  • updated beta to 105.0.5195.37
  • updated dev to 106.0.5231.2
  • now using $SNAP_REAL_HOME in chromium.launcher (requires snapd 2.46) in the dev branch

snapcraft24 snaps

package24 other

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WSL

  • Drafted a splash screen for the reconfiguration workflow running on Windows.
  • Proposed a PR to Subiquity to let user skip installing language packs if wanted. Subiquity#1390
  • Drafted the same concept of skipping language packs in the Flutter GUI. Requires merging the server to turn into a pull request. Conversation about this topic is in UDI issue 1073
  • Modified the language blocklist in the Flutter GUI to be set per entry point. This enables translations that were lacking fonts on Ubuntu WSL to render nicely when the OOBE is running natively on Windows. UDI#1076

UDI

Others

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