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.
Short week: had Monday off and took half of Friday off
network manager now has a config hook merged for netplan and upated netplan tests.
Joined the Womens Resource Group and wrote a mock wiki page helping flesh out some of their initiatives.
Worked on LO snap: 7.1 release as well as 7.0.4 + gnome-3-38+core20 updates. Making real progress on the updates. They will make the 7.1 release easier and greatly slim down the snap.
Reminder that LO deb transition is going to @ricotz (so glad to have your official leadership!!) starting now but I’ll keep up maintenance on the snap.
Then later, after that was all fixed, helped to get glibc migrated - happened on Friday, yay
Had a retrospective on 20.04.2.0 and came up with some ideas to Do Better™
Hint reviews and other related things, like reviewing the “noudeb” branch for proposed-migration (udebs are a debian-installer thing which are being dropped in hirsute).
CUPS Snap: It is in the Snap Store now! (Edge channel). Changed the CUPS patch for checking administrative inquiries to use @jamesh’s snapctl is-connected changes which have landed last week (thanks a lot, @jamesh and everyone involved). Cleaned up plugs of the utilities, updated README.md, and updated the upstream package versions. Also tested and discussed (with @ijohnson) needed interface connections and requested the auto-connections. For replacing the DEB packages of CUPS by the Snap (or an all-Snap distro) only retro-fitting of all printer drivers into Printer Applications is missing. Removed the old, obsolete printing-stack-snap from the Snap Store (simply made the entry for it private).
CUPS: CUPS upstream development is now decoupled from Apple. After Apple not doing any further upstream development on CUPS for the whole 2020 I have first forked it on OpenPrinting some months ago and now the original author of CUPS, Michael Sweet has asked for removal of the “forked from apple/cups” relationship on the OpenPrinting Github and presented his plans on continuation of the upstream development. So we have solved the CUPS upstream crisis now.
sane-airscan: Still waiting for the MIR to get reviewed by the security team. Feature Freeze for Hirsute is approaching, I had posted the MIR in time for Groovy already.
sane-backends: Packaged the new 1.0.32 release as it has an improved “escl” backend, to at least somewhat overcome the “sane-airscan” still not in Main.
Feature Freeze for Hirsute: Checked through all the printing-related packages and nearly everything was up-to-date due to auto-syncing from Debian (so most of Debian’s and our printing stack is in sync!). Asked Debian printing maintainer to updated HPLIP to 3.21.2 and he did and it synced into Hirsute now.
Google Summer of Code 2021: Continued mentoring candidates on working on cups-filters and CUPS GitHub issues as part of the selection process. Applications for mentoring organizations have closed, organizations will be selected until March 9, 2021.
Laptop refresh: Ordered it (Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Nano 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, US keyboard), my USB-C monitor (Dell UltraSharp U2721DE, 27" QHD) and external keyboard (US layout, not easy to find here).
investigated and fixed beta 86 armhf builds (by selectively downgrading the LTO option to “thin” to work around OOM failures in Launchpad builders)
Prepared 86.0 release candidate builds, scheduled for release tomorrow. Unfortunately a last minute rebuild is necessary, which is likely to delay a bit the update in Ubuntu.
Triaged a bug whereby the configure hook fails because the gnome-3-28-1804 platform snap isn’t connected, and proposed a mitigation in snapcraft, which Sergio promptly reviewed. I need to follow up.
Opened snapd PR #9952, to make the x11 interface work with recent changes to how KDE Plasma’s Wayland session sets up its Xauthority cookies.
Made a review pass over snapd PR #8699 (implement a new desktop-launch interface).
snapd-glib:
Marked snapd-glib PR #97 (improved snapctl API binding) ready for review. I updated the Qt binding and added a small example program demonstrating the use of the snapctl API (since it is not quite as obvious as other code: you need to override the socket path, and use the value of an environment variable for one of the other arguments).
Ubuntu Core GDM Experiment:
I did some experiments to try and get the Chromium snap up and running on the test image.
At first it wouldn’t install, because the snap’s configure hook assumed there would be system fonts available. But without a desktop interface slot to connect to, there was nothing available at install time.
After a new build was pushed to the candidate channel that ignored this error from fc-cache, I was able to install the snap, and get it to display in the confined desktop session. This comes with some pretty big caveats:
I had to manually connect the chromium:x11 plug to the corresponding slot on the desktop session.
I had to copy the confined desktop session’s Xauthority data to a location Chromium could read.
I had to launch it from a terminal outside of the confined desktop session, since one snap can’t run commands provided by a second.
The hope is that we can fix some of those issues with the new desktop-launch API.
Other:
Helped the Yaru community developers debug an icon display bug in the theme in yaru issue #2630. They had switched to simplifying the SVG icons using svgo, which minified the paths to a form that seems to be spec compliant, but tripped up the parser in the pre-Rust versions of librsvg (as found in e.g. Ubuntu 18.04). This was first noticed in core18 based classic snaps misrendering icons when the new version of the theme was installed.
I opened glib issue #2335, asking to add an API for determining whether portals