Desktop Team Updates - Monday 23rd August 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 16th August 2021

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  • Stats for OEM.
  • Support for custom image builds.
  • Candidate images of 20.04.3 have been announced, starting testing.
  • Added WSL and related test case to the ISO tracker. 20.04.3 is the first release with WSL being officially part of the release with all the other products.
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Desktop Installer

Subiquity client

WSL setup

Flutter contributions

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  • CUPS Snap: Waiting for @ijohnson’s pull request on snapd for the cups printing interface to get merged by the snapd team.
  • pappl-retrofit: Given birth to the new CUPS Printer Driver Retro-Fit Library (libpappl-retrofit). The library development got started with the code of the PostScript Printer Application and is now generalized to not only support PPD files but also CUPS filters and even CUPS backends. Retro-fitting of classic CUPS drivers into a Printer Application is now very easy. One defines the configuration of the Printer Application with a small C stub (included feature, filter rules, name/version, some custom function, like whether a printer is supported) and packages it with the PPD files and CUPS filters/backends of the classic driver. This can also be easily snapped and put up in the Snap Store. As an example see the current PostScript Printer Application on GitHub, its C file, snapcraft.yaml, …
  • PostScript Printer Application: Switched it over to use the pappl-retrofit library (which originated in the code of the PostScript Printer Application). Now the the source code of it is nearly empty, everything in the library. Also updated the Snap in the Snap Store. Now the nice IPP-attribute->PPD-option-setting conversion feature is also available here.
  • cups-filters: Completed implementation of auto-generation of PPD option setting presets for the combinations of print-color-mode, print-quality, and print-content-optimize job IPP attribute settings for use of this feature also in CUPS, especially saving of print-content-optimize presets in the cache files and also some bug fixes. Built witc gcc11, got some new warnings, silenced them, fixed some minor bugs. bannertopdf got converted into a filter function. And released 1.28.10 with all the bug fixes ported over from 2.x in the last 2 months.
  • CUPS: In time before Impish Feature Freeze ported the auto-generation of PPD Option presets for combinations of standard IPP attributes for color/bw, quality, content optimizations from cups-filters into CUPS, so that the new feature is not only available for Printer Applications but also for classic CUPS print queues. This allows also to print with simplified user interfaces (like phones) and easily control the print quality for (shared) CUPS queues. Not yet upstream, but already as patch in the 2.3.3op2-5ubuntu1 package in Impish.
  • Ghostscript: Had another talk with @hellsworth about the FTBFS problem (it compiled but on the non-amd64 architectures many installed files were not assigned to binary packages) and came to a solution: I had to “Downgrade” dh_missing from --fail-missing to --list-missing to avoid the FTBFS on non-amd64 from compat 13 on. compat13 switched the default from --list-missing to --fail-missing.
  • Impish Feature Freeze: Updated cups, cups-filters, ghostscript, sane-backends, sane-airscan, ipp-usb, hplip, foomatic-db, foo2zjs, and epson-inkjet-printer-escpr to the current upstream or Debian versions.
  • Google Summer of Code 2021: Last steps of mentoring the students and reviewing there final reports. The coding period has ended now and the mentors give their final evaluations. All the 5 students did great work for OpenPrinting. Got pull requests for rendering-intent in ghostscript() and imagetoraster(), mupdftoraster() filter function, and bannertopdf() PPD-file-independent.
  • Ubuntu Indaba: Preparation video meeting with @hellsworth, explained here how the current CUPS printing architecture works and how the new all-IPP, PPD-less, Printer/Scanner-Application-based, fully snappable printing architecture works, also gave some background how this all developed in the last 21 years. @hellsworth will now create some infographics for the presentations on the Indaba.
  • Bugs.
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firefox24 firefox

thunderbird24 thunderbird

  • filed a bug to keep thunderbird 91 in impish-proposed until an upstream point release enables upgrades from 78 to 91
  • tested the snap in the candidate channel (91), and confirmed Séb’s observation that existing profiles aren’t being used on upgrade
  • continued investigating bug reports about window tracking on wayland, the issue seems to be Ubuntu-specific somehow

chromium22 chromium

flutter24 Ubuntu Desktop Installer

package24 other

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  • catchup after holidays
  • did GNOME updates
  • sponsored an anjuta build fix from ricotz
  • thunderbird snap
    • updated stable to 78.13.0
    • reviewed and merged a contribution to stage libgpgme which is needed for smartcards
    • updated candidate to the new 91.0.1 serie but profile migration isn’t working so not promoting yet, Olivier proposed a fix upstream
  • tested the current version of the ubuntu-desktop-installer, promoted the snap to stable
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  • Worked on LO bug on spreadsheet crash. Eventually filed an upstream bug. I lost some time here thinking the issue was cpu related, thinking it might be an amd only problem, so I setup a little amd notebook with a fresh install and turns out it was all just a red herring. It ended up just being a spreadsheet-specific problem (couldn’t easily make my own spreadsheet that caused the crash).
  • Did some testing around LO 7.2.0 snap. The fonts are horrible on Impish only and wayland only. More investigation is needed.
  • launched new glimpse builds for USNs
  • looked at ghostscript ftbfs problem… it was building on amd64 only because of dh_missing is leading to a dh_fail (this is ever since the debhelper compat level was raised from 12 to 13). I tried to reproduce the problem locally on a pi4 with debian experimental env (to submit an upstream patch) but it built fine… then i setup my pi with ubuntu server impish proposed and it built fine… then I learned that I needed to use dpkg-build-ackage -B … that damn -B opion … But then an override was added and uploaded to workaround the problem. Even after a fix was uploaded, i continued to try and develop a patch that addresses the missing files. I found that if you make sure the missing files are installed via the libgs9-common.install file, the build with -B passes but now fails without -B. Possibly the libgs9.install is the right place. Still investigating.
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