Desktop Team Updates - Monday 25th May 2020

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.
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.

Last week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates - Monday 18th May 2020

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:desktop_computer: Gnome Shell and friends:

:house: Housekeeping:

  • Many bug reports taking hours to triage still, but certainly fewer than previous weeks. :beetle:

:chart_with_downwards_trend: Backlog tracking

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ZSys:

  • Published blog post on our ZFS work on ubuntu 20.04 LTS #1: “What’s New?”
  • Advanced timeout support (startup timeout and service are differentiated). The timeout will now always reset when service is doing some activity (debug logs are used as “pulse” even if not printed). This avoids timeouting while we were doing long-running work.
  • Prevent full disk still allowing snapshotting, so that we keep a reserve and don’t file up ourself any pool.
  • Change some ZSys default configuration to cover a full year only with the monthly rule, default socket configuration.
  • Fix userdatasets handling which could have removed incorrectly any user created dataset under /USERDATA/ (which is still considered a reserved space though)
  • Allow deleting users (still need to do the deluser part)
  • Misc typos and messages fixes
  • CI fix
  • Bug triaging and iterating. Filing bugs myself for work needed to be done.
  • Fixed and uploaded docker fix with ZFS driver to avoid cluttering the ZFS dataset namespace to groovy.
    Misc:
  • Reviewed mathjax MIR.
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firefox24 firefox

  • preparing 77.0 update (the first RC was published yesterday)

chromium22 chromium

  • updated stable to 83.0.4103.61
    • smoke testing revealed that video playback consistently crashes the renderer process on xenial (both amd64 and i386), needs investigation
    • the bionic update is good to go
  • updating dev to 84.0.4147.13
  • successfully built and tested a snap that builds and stages intel-vaapi-driver and intel-media-driver, called for testing and feedback so far is positive
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Packaging

  • Reiteration on gnome-shell / mutter packages for 3.36.2 in order to fix SRU crash regressions

GNOME

  • Updates to gjs fixes and cleanups for arguments management [MR]
  • Some discussion with mutter upstream about monitor config MRs

Fprint

  • Maintenance work (reviews)
  • Some more backports in the tod branch
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  • Vac this week
  • Distro
  • SRU
    • gamde: backported a fix to revert to previous cpu governor instead of “powersave” when exiting
    • investigated a gnome-clocks regression, sounds stopped working due to vala changes
    • debugged/fixed the n-m hotspot feature not working for upgraded systems not using usrmerge
    • backported some wpa patches pointed out by submitters
    • backported a libproxy fix for extra warnings
    • backported a fix for djvulibre segfaulting on atombased CPU to bionic
    • backported a gnome-logs patch to fix the journal permissions reading
  • Sponsoring
    • sponsored the fixed valac version, rebuilt gnome-clocks and verified it fixed the issue
    • Synced ibus thanks to Gunnar who got the Ubuntu changes upstreamed to Debian
    • Upload the adwaita-icon-theme update from Olivier + a regression fix
  • Other
    • spent quite some time still on launchpad and errors triaging
    • verified several desktop SRU in focal
    • investigated/followed up on e.u.c warnings raised for some of the SRU updates, no actual regression, asked to unblock
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  • ZSys:
    • Do not snapshot if there is a risk of filling the disk.
    • Fixed handling of user dataset under /USERDATA/
  • Fixed Smoke tests for Focal and Groovy.
  • Setup test rig for AD.
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Short 3 day week

  • More work on rebasing / refactoring britney patches, including discussion with upstream
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desktop theme support for snaps:

  • I put together some prototype code to detect desktop theme changes and determine whether there are already snaps installed providing that theme data to other snaps, or if there are ones available in the store that can provide them. I wrote up some notes about it on the Snapcraft forum

snapd dbus activation support:

  • I’ve received feedback on the dbus activation branch, that I’m working to resolve. The branch will need a second review after that though.

I also did some work related to a security update.

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Libreoffice

  • built libreoffice 6.4.4 in my ppa but arm builds struggling… at first due to builder failures and then for some other erroneous reason… Rico’s arm builds aren’t failing so I’ve been just retrying. eventually arm64 passed and need to keep retrying armhf. in the meantime can go ahead and launch some autopkgtests to get this hopefully uploaded soon.
  • tested the amd64 libreoffice 6.4.4 package and went off on some red herrings that i thought were issues but turned out they’re not (a save button finickyness due to my user’s install that couldn’t be reproduced anywhere else + libreoffice-java-common being expected). the help bug is fixed in this version (yay!)
  • verified that Alt+X works in 6.4.4
  • looked into possible 6.4.3 regression and not really sure how to proceed… looks like the issue has cropped up periodically throughout several versions. Perhaps related is another possible regression in 6.4.3 but these stacktraces are not really intelligible. would much prefer what the problem is so i can try to reproduce it.

network manager

  • continuing to look at network manager snap when possible. made a merge request to add a missing build-package and in the process learned how to make a merge request in LP
  • attended my first bi-weekly meeting with the system snaps folks that have been maintaining the network manager snap. my action for the next meeting is to investigate netplan and including what foundations has provided in the nm snap
  • sorted out booting a core18 kvm with ogra’s help. this is needed to test new network-manager snaps. now need to try core20 again…

Misc

  • helped a user fix their gimp version and then posted the solution in case anyone else has this problem.
  • wiped laptop and sent it back to lenovo so they can fix my webcam… what a hassle (there’s a fw update needed that can only be applied through windows and i refuse to mess with that)
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