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.
Worked on build-environment bug. Still not finished. The TL;DR is that the build-environment section is stored in a list of OrderedDicts and hash() can’t be implemented on dicts so some other method needs to be implemented to properly merge such lists.
Help out with forum posts - 2% of my time
Replied to a couple of posts but really need to do more in this area in the future.
cherrytree - 3% of my time
snap’d it but still there are theming issues. need to look more into this.
compliance training - 3% of my time
did several but there are still 7 left
Misc (everything else) - 28% of my time
opened my first MIR! but there is still another one needed for libscalar-list-utils-perl
looked a bit into harfbuzz/pango in update_excuses. pango still has an error that will need to be reproduced locally and reported upstream
filed gnome-shell bug that is hitting me frequently on both desktop and laptop. would like to find time to look into a reproducer.
looking into why gjs is added to the extension layouts and causes 500-1000ms latency. Turns out it was added for convenience but nobody knew it would affect the performance like it does.
Plan for W48
It’s a short week for me, working only Monday and Tuesday due to the holiday + swap days.
gnome-3-34 extension
Fix this darn build-environment bug - I’m soooo close!
implement authorization framework on zsys, via unix socket SO_PEERCRED element passing and polkit.
hooked it up in GRPC (apparently, no-one has ever done it / code published before \o/)
added Version() grpc call, to validate non authorized (permissive) calls. The version is automatically extracted when building the package (and can be separated between daemon and server)
adapted the packaging to new daemon/client architecture
uploaded new zsys 0.3. However, currently FTBS due to golang-go not providing a valid alternative. Will revert to 1.12 and fix missing system dbus failing tests in builder environment.
tested and validated thunderbird 68.2.1+build1 and related dependencies in {bionic,eoan}-proposed, now pending publication by the security team
updated to 60.9.1 for a fix to bug #1850651 (Authentication constantly re-requested for Google); since this was not a valid candidate for publication by the security team, I prepared a SRU and uploaded to {xenial,disco}-proposed
chromium
use a scriptlet to extract the version number from the source tarball, to avoid duplication in snapcraft.yaml
Snap-only CUPS in 20.04: Investigations for whether this is actually doable. Especially checked the documentation of SANE and PWG’s driverless IPP scanning standard to evaluate whether it is possible to code the IPP scanning support for 20.04. This would be needed to snap HPLIP as it is a driver for both printing and scanning.
Snap-only CUPS in 20.04: Posted an e-mail with a summary of what will change in printing and scanning in the future and what is needed for 20.04.
Google Cloud Print: Google will shut it down by the end of 2020. Should it still got to 20.04 LTS?
The backports are now in proposed for xenial and bionic.
@jdstrand also ran through the test plan from the bug report verifying that these packages function correctly.
Automatic theme installation for snaps:
I attended a meeting with some snapd core devs about how we will handle installation of theme data for snaps not covered by the gtk-common-themes snap.
The meeting was constructive, and I published my notes from the meeting extended with some thoughts I had the day after:
In short, this would require a background user session daemon that monitors theme changes via GtkSettings, and would call into a new snapd API to ensure snaps to support the theme selection are installed.
Other snapd work:
Still working on the user session service management code. I need to get some of the PRs merged.