Desktop Team Updates - Monday 24th January 2022

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 update’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates - Monday 17th January 2022

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Desktop Installer

Other

  • Extended the Flutter “skeleton” app with Yaru & GSettings
  • Experimented on a new ubuntu_window package for making it easy to use libhandy in Flutter apps
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WSL

  • Continued tests wih the latest cloud images after Updated Subiquity submodule in Ubuntu-Desktop-Installer.
  • Fixed some bugs detected in Subiquity System_Setup component (WSL exclusive).
  • Continuing investigation of APT issues under the hybrid snap environment on WSL.
  • Continued the development of the splash screen subproject.

Others

  • Reviewed a few U-D-I and ubuntu-flutter-plugins pull requests.
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  • ADsys
    • Worked on refactoring of policies management for assets management.
  • Misc:
    • MIR: investigate cups and other mismatches trying to pull new components in main.
    • PR reviews.
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  • wrote the description of the protobuf-c MIR, needed for fwupd to handle new logitech devices
  • worked on improving the Canonical Desktop Team onboarding
  • landed changes to ubuntu-advantage-desktop-daemon to use systemd hardening features
  • closed the suitesparse-graphblas MIR after that Christian pointed out rightly that we could probably demote binaries instead
  • updated outdated upstream references on versions
  • landed a github workflow to the thunderbird snap to automatically update the beta when new versions get available
  • reviewed our currently open MIR requests and updated priorities
  • reviewed the proposed change from Lukasz to add a ‘show password’ icon to ubiquity text entries
  • started working on a document listing the services we rely on for Ubuntu Desktop
  • worked on adding ubuntu-bug integration for the new desktop installer
  • Roadmap sprint
  • Worked on helping getting some Main Inclusion Reports ready, especially add a systemd job to ubuntu-advantage-desktop-daemon to use the systemd hardening features
  • worked on making the thunderbird beta snap to use a github workflow to automatically update to newer versions, based on Olivier’s work for firefox
  • started a document listing the services we are using in Ubuntu Desktop
  • started on a JIRA board for onboarding new team members
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firefox24 firefox

  • prepared 96.0.2 builds for all supported releases
  • shared plan for transition of snap repo to github with Mozilla

thunderbird24 thunderbird

  • the security team sponsored my update to 91.5.0 for bionic, focal, hirsute and impish

chromium22 chromium

  • rebased dev branch on core20
  • kept core18 branch around for i386 builds, but they have been broken for 8 major releases now, upstream doesn’t support this architecture, and we don’t have the manpower to look into the issue, so we won’t be producing new i386 builds for now
  • updated stable to 97.0.4692.99
  • updated beta to 98.0.4758.54, then to 98.0.4758.66
  • updated dev to 99.0.4818.0, then to 99.0.4840.0

flutter24 Ubuntu Desktop Installer

package24 other

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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. Now only one final review by a snapd team member is missing, so we are shortly before landing it! Did some final testing with @ijohnson and all is working fine with the current snapshot of snapd. The bug of having to re-connect the “cups” interface after updating snapd will now be treated independently by @mvo and does not block the PR for the “cups” interface any more.
  • cups-filters: Continued testing and bug-fixing to approach the 2.x release. In the handling of PPD file collections by libppd made the stderr logging of external PPD generator executables (what usually goes into /usr/lib/cups/driver) being captured and re-directed into the log function (commit), invesigated further to find other “logging leaks” into stderr in libcupsfilters and libppd. Worked woth code contributor candidates for GSoC on several bugs of cups-filters.
  • HPLIP Printer Application: Updated the contained HPLIP version to 3.21.12 (Snap Store). According to user feedback in Issue #1 and Issue #2 on an update to this version of the Snap a proprietary plugin installed with an older Snap version gets automatically updated to the current (3.21.12) version of the plugin. Only the automatic loading of the firmware file into the printer does nit work (Issue #2), at least not on ARM, a case was not able to test. The reporter of the issue is now debugging this under my mentorship. Also studied Snap versioning concepts, especially of LibreOffice and simple-scan to find a way for the versioning of the Printer Applications, based on the version number of the underlying driver.
  • CUPS: By the way, Michael Sweet is already working on the new PPD-less and modularized CUPS 3.x (Mike’s personal libcups repo)!
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: Contributor candidates continue to get CUPS and cups-filters GitHub issues as assignments and are working on them, mainly under my mentorship.
  • Bugs.
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• appstream.u.c updates
• las website/org creation/updates
• gh snaps updating
• interviews
• community office hours
• indaba coming next friday
• LO 7.3.0 testing

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