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.
Finally upgraded to mozjs68 and gjs master and reprofiled a few gnome-shell scenarios to verify the big performance bottleneck is gone with gjs 1.63. Seems to be.
Focal desktop testing with the Nvidia driver. Almost no bugs found. The upcoming smoothness/latency optimization (mutter 3.36.0-2ubuntu1) also works well with the Nvidia driver.
Some (more?) work on getting appstream-generator updated in the staging environment http://appstream.staging.ubuntu.com, should be ready to switch over the main instance later this week.
Helping to get gnome shell 3.36.0 ready to push, is prepared…
but before that can be done, need to clear some transitions out of focal-proposed, so I helped with that a bit.
Updated gnome-shell packaging to move the “Extensions” app to a different package, so as not to install it by default for everyone who it’s not useful for.
Had some discussions with release team members and others about how to best manage release week and the period leading up to it - usually we’d be together in person, but not this time.
libmtp: The UDEV rules of this support library for USB-connected audio and video players test positive on many printers setting the group ownership to “audio” making the printers inaccessible for printing software (Bug 1863239). Provided a patch/debdiff to solve this problem. Only needs a friendly core-dev to upload.
gsfonts: My bug report asking to remove the dependencies on this package which is unmaintained for more than a decade was successful. In the packages python3-reportlab and libwmf the dependency got replaced by fonts-urw-base35. Thanks @seb128.
HPLIP: The FFe for version 3.20.3 got accepted, so the newest HP printers are supported (if they are not supported anyway thanks to driverless printing and scanning).
cups-filters: Released 1.27.3 upstream to off-load the pending bug fixes to make way for the feature development to support Printer Applications, as mentioned here last week.
SANE: Explained the IPP Scan/Scanner Application concept to the author of the “airscan” backend. Succeeded to stop the dispute between the maintainers of the two eSCL/AirScan backends, “escl” and “airscan”, also successfully revived the request for inclusion of the “airscan” backend and made the two maintainers of the “escl” and “airscan” join their projects!!.
Google Summer of Code 2020: Continued to prepare the student candidates for writing their proposals and reviewed incoming proposals together with the mentors. Especially Michael Sweet helped in explaining PAPPL and Alexander Pevzner explained how SANE works to the IPP Scan student. Deadline for the proposals is March 31.
OpenPrinting: Monthly phone meeting and OpenPrinting News for March 2020. Zdenek Dohnal, printing maintainer of Red Hat, thanked me (and also Michael Sweet) for the “detailed description of the Printer Applications behavior” in this post.
Further testing of Firefox’s support for xdg-desktop-portal w.r.t. snaps.
As well as known the previously known problems, I ran into a new one where Firefox was relying on the user’s choice of a filter in a “file save” dialog to control behaviour. However xdg-desktop-portal provides no information about what filter the user chose. I’ve filed xdg-desktop-portal bug #458 to track this.
To improve behaviour of applications that use the sandbox’s /usr/bin/xdg-open proxy, I’ve been working on a patch to have it prefer xdg-desktop-portal over snap userd: snapd PR #8289. For opening links, this should be invisible. If used to open local files, it should result in a much nicer UI to the existing ugly Zenity dialog. This is close to being ready to land, with the spread test succeeding on most systems.
snapd dbus activation support:
There were some race conditions in some of the session agent spread tests. I was asked to look into it, and put together snapd PR #8318 to try and address it. Sometimes the session agent socket was not available when the test body started running, leading to a test failure. The fix was to wait for the sockets.target unit to finish starting before running the tests.
I’m fixing up the last issues with the user daemons branch. I’ve added some more test coverage, but need to turn some warnings into hard errors.
build new libreoffice 6.4.2 release in ppa, got all autopkgtests passing
360 review
Updated gnome-3-34-1804-sdk snap to use gtk 3.24.11 instead of 3.24.10, which meant adding a wayland-protocols part too. This included a side investigation into all of the upstream bugs fixed between 3.24.10 - 3.24.14 to see if we wanted to make the full upgrade but we decided to leave that for the gnome-3-36 build snap
Started a gnome-3-36 build snap and updating all of the parts
Gnome Shell:
House keeping:
firefox
thunderbird
chromium
other