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.
Ported example lightning-talk-gong to use the new dbus package and then ported again to use the even newer desktop_notifications package. Thanks @robert.ancell for making this simpler
Snap Store:
Finished work on building libfwupd with libjcat as a part
Working on upstream’s list of things-to-test for 10-bit deep colour support. Note there aren’t any known problems with the branch so if you want to try it out then please do.
reviewed golang-github-openprinting-goipp and golang-gopkg-ini.v1
reviewed sane-airscan
pushed to get a subscriber on khronos-opencl-clhpp
investigated a bunch of Golang dev packages being imported, ended up editing the seed to exclude automated pulling of -dev after discussing with Colin. Now, no more golang packages shows up in component-misatches!
Misc:
Discuss with Marcus about desktop installer
Help Yaru team with repo migration and other questions
Migrated my blog on canonistack (self-hosted and moving home currently). Got some requests to bring it back up to be able to read the ZSys blog posts which became popular
• 7.0 snap: removed tango and fixing patches, added polish language support. currently have a snap build that fails to upload to store. also icons aren’t quite right. currently investigating.
• readied 7.0.1~rc1-0ubuntu1 with gcc9 build in ppa, ran autopkgtests, and then it was uploaded to groovy. @laney , @marcustomlinson , @ricotz : thanks for all your help in this!
• worked on reproducing local armhf builds with armhf groovy on a pi 4. the problem now is that the tarballs dir is not being created… still needs more investigation
Misc
• Snapcraft: built and tested snapcraft pr regarding bindtextdomain for multiarch in the gnome extension
• NM Snap: had the bi-weekly meeting and next steps are to identify complete list of things needed to release 1.22.10 and discuss trategy for store track names
snapd PR #9043 (refactor access checking for snapd’s REST API) is still waiting on a security review.
I’ve been working on implementing the theme API, roughly implementing what we were doing with the REST API in snapd-desktop-integration. No pull request ready just yet.
snapd interface connection API:
snapd PR #9168 was merged, which split out the parts to have snapctl is-connected check that the named plug/slot exists.
snapd PR #9132 was rebased on top of those changes. It still needs some work to support CUPS’s use case of wanting to talk to host system processes and classic confined snaps. The plan is to have it return distinct non-zero exit codes for those cases. This way the command behaves similar to regular snapctl is-connected for scripts that treat the exit status as a boolean, while still providing the information needed.
Ubuntu Core GDM Spike:
I put the scripts I used to build the Ubuntu Core GDM images on Github with a GH Actions workflow to build the images.
I updated the images to include a basic Ubuntu session that can be run unconfined, and make /usr/share/wayland-sessions writable in order to allow installing additional sessions.
Using this, @alan_g managed to get his egmde-confined-desktop snap running as a user session launchable from GDM.
I’ve also got a partially working strict confined Ubuntu session running:
Printer Applications/cups-filters: Reconsidered adding functions for reading out job/printer IPP attributes. PAPPL does it already for printer applications. What we need is to get what PAPPL delivers to us into the option list for the filter functions.
cups-filters: We have now filter functions for pstops, pdftops, pclmtoraster, rastertopdf, rastertopclm, rastertops.
cups-filters: Created a 1.x branch to approach version 1.28.0 for Groovy. The master branch has already departed to make it to 2.0.0, the next, Printer-Application-supporting generation of cups-filters. Bug fixes and IPP Fax Out support get cherry-picked into 1.x.
ipp-usb: The MIR got acknowledged by the MIR team and is now checked by the security team. Asked upstream author to eliminate dependency on the IPP.v1 Go library, as this one pulls in a dependency chain on Go libraries in Universe. The upstream author did the needed changes.
sane-airscan: Also the MIR for this package got accepted by the MIR team and gets checked by the security team now.
Google Summer of Code 2020: Continued mentoring work, answered student’s questions, explained them what is needed, … GSoC 2020 is approaching its end now. The students are now requested to write their final work reports and submit them until Monday. After that the mentors do the final evaluations.
Groovy: Updated my laptop to Groovy, all working, only Kernel 5.8.x does not boot, have to stay with Focal’s 5.4.x for now.
Linux Foundation Mentorship Program: The first approach of IPP Fax Out support via the driverless utility is merged and I am fine-tuning it for cups-filters 1.28.0 for Groovy. The other student is creating chroot jails for proprietary printer drivers and also working on a Printer Application for PostScript printers. For the IPP Scan project starting next week we are selecting our 2 students in the next days. 3 are discussing the project a lot with us.
Linux Plumber’s Conference 2020 (Virtual): The conference has started, and even if you do not have registered, everything is broadcasted live on YouTube (links will be activated soon before the sessions start) So you can tune in to the OpenPrinting microconference on Friday, August 28, at 2pm UTC. I also got a speakers gift package with headphones, a webcam, LED lighting, and a Libre Computer AML-S805X-AC “La Frite” (+ eMMC 5.x 8GB). Already did a first setup and tests with the device, will use it for the CUPS Snap and Printer Application tests.
Gnome Shell and friends:
Bug tracking:
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firefox
thunderbird
chromium