Desktop Team Updates - Monday 27th January 2020

[robert.ancell]

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: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/desktop-team-updates-monday-20th-january-2020/14025

[robert.ancell]

• Fixed broken CI in gnome-control-center.
• Diagnosed why snap-store based on 3.34 wasn’t showing .debs.
• Made a GNOME Software branch that uses the snap command line client auth data.
• Implemented theme switcher with new assets from design.

[jibel]

• ZFS:
  • Finished porting machine tests to new API.
  • Added support for snapshots to zsys with associated functional tests.
  • Added CLI to manage system and user snapshots.
  • Started work on garbage collection.
• Investigated Bionic daily image automated tests failure

[vanvugt]

Gnome Shell, mostly performance:

• background: Scale monitor_area after texture creation: Revised due to revelations about how integer vs fractional scaling is used. Turns out you can’t write the same logic for integer=3 as for fractional=3.0. Now the branch supports both cases.
• background: Limit mipmap levels to avoid loss of visible detail: Resolved fractional scaling issues using the previous branch above.
• workspace: Animate window clones using translation properties: Simplified and fixed window dragging when in the activities overview.
• overviewControls: Use ClutterActor’s translation-x: Another significant piece in the puzzle toward making the activities overview animations more efficient and smooth.
• iconGrid: Remove _paintVisible opacity tracking: Another boost for the icon (un)spring animation performance.
• backend-eglnative: Search for the xsettings schema recursively: Fixes blurry shell fonts in Wayland sessions, again.

Release bugs:

• Bluetooth headphones default to low quality headset mode and fail to switch to A2DP when selected: The fixes are still waiting on approval in the bionic queue and in the eoan queue.

Backlog tracking

[kenvandine]

• snap-store: continued working on apt support
• USN refreshes

[marcustomlinson]

LibreOffice

• Began mentoring @hellsworth in LibreOffice packaging.
• Bug triaging:
  • Closed around 10 duplicate bugs,
  • and marked another 30-odd incomplete.

Snaps

• Snap performance investigation continued.
• Merged 2x snapcraft PRs:
  • Use ensure_dir_exists instead of mkdir -p,
  • and Sync fixes from snapcraft-desktop-helpers.
• USN refreshes.

[seb128]

• Travelled to the Canonical mid-cycle review sprint
• Focal work
  • desktop components updates (libpeas, rhythmbox, gvfs)
  • debian merges (libssh)
  • backported a libxml2/python patch to fix the ubuntu-docs build
  • sponsored the slideshow focal update from Martin
  • sponsored a libunity/vala fix from Rico, fixed the python depends
  • updated ubuntu-settings to not list the new texinfo .desktop in Ubuntu sessions
• Proposed migration
  • promoted fonts-smc-gayathri, MIR was approved,
  • promoted enchant-2, it’s replacing enchant this cycle
  • update glib to skip the new memory monitor tests if xdg-desktop-portal is not available (e.g on focal/i386)
  • fixed libpeas/python2 build failure
  • debugged/reported a gvfs tests failure due to the test certificate used not being compatbiel with the new openssl requirements
  • debugged a bit gvfs/davs tests hanging and reported with some info upstream
  • started debugging network-manager tests failing since the new serie was uploaded

[didrocks]

ZFS:

• Finished porting machine tests to new API.
• Added support for snapshots to zsys with associated functional tests.
• Added CLI to manage system and user snapshots.
• Implement per user granularity permissions

Misc:

• Yaru PR reviews
• ubuntu-settings upload: change tab color in ubuntu session to use dark theme by default

[hellsworth]

Had monday off for a holiday

• snap’d cherrytree and got metadata accepted upstream
• updated snapcraft gnome-3-34 extension pr for all tests to pass
• LAS organization
• worked with @marcustomlinson to start learning about libreoffice maintenance with the plan to take it over. this is where I spent most of my time.

[oSoMoN]

firefox

• prepared 72.0.2+build1 update
• confirmed that geolocation stopped working because the Google Maps API is always returning error codes, this is being dealt with on Google’s side

chromium

• updating stable to 79.0.3945.130
• updating beta to 80.0.3987.66
• updating dev to 81.0.4033.2

other

• started to implement the Channels tab in software-properties to streamline the UI, this is very much WIP at this point

[till-kamppeter]

• CUPS in a Snap: Many more fixes and improvements (studying other snaps, like lxd):
  • Struggeled with DNS lookup not working for .local (Bug 1838038, should be made an rls bug)
  • Added AirPrint server functionality to CUPS
  • Added system-files interface plug to make password authentication work
  • Added shutdown and reload scripts for CUPS and for cups-browsed (now I have a clean shutdown, first cups-browsed then cups)
  • Moved config files to the $SNAP_COMMON dir, PID files to $SNAP_DATA/var/run
  • Do not re-create the config files on every restart or update
  • Updated cups-filters to version 1.27.0 (worked on cups-browsed here to reliably work with CUPS on an alternative port, only connecting via domain socket).
• cups-filters: Released upstream version 1.27.0: In this release cups-browsed does not need to know the port number of the CUPS daemon it is attached to any more when it connects via domain socket and many additional filters support zero-page jobs now (Issue #117).
• IPP-over-USB: Further tests on the ippusbxd replacement ipp-usb
• Focal: IRC Meeting with @kenvandine about the transition of the printing/scanning support into snaps. For Focal we should only convert the drivers and introduce the CUPS snap in the very beginning of the 20.10 cycle so that it gets well tested.
• Google Summer of Code 2020: Continued to let student candidates on assignments (like cups-filters bugs) to evaluate them for this year’s GSoC).
• Bugs.

[3v1n0]

Fingerprint

• Merged fixes for synaptics drivers verification [MR]
• Updates to TOD branch to merge with latest internal API changes
• Soname change in libfprint to libfprint-2 [MR, merged] and update fprintd [MR, cherry-picked]
• Started implementing faster verification path for fprintd
• Rewritten the build and test system of fprintd to use meson [MR]
• Upsteam reviews

Misc

• Further tests in new network-manager fix for #239 (NOTFIXED )
• Refcatored pam-wrapper packaging, splitting into libpam-wrapper and libpamtesting and relative -dev [MR]
• Fixed a crash in pam-wrapper happening when using it in fprintd pam module tests [MR]

[jamesh]

I was off on Monday due to the public holiday associated with Australia Day.

snapd pull requests:

• I updated PR #7588 (implementing a snap routine portal-info command) based on some discussions on IRC: moving some of the
• PR #7456 (client library for user session agent) has been reviewed. It still needs to be merged.
• I’ve been reworking PR #5822 (user daemons support) to work with latest trunk and add support restarting user daemons. I’ve still got a bit to go before it is ready for a re-review.

Fixes for “nakedret” static analysis tool

• Last week, CI started failing for all snapd pull requests. I helped track down the cause, which was an upstream update to a static analysis tool.
• The update was intended to fix some false negatives in the tool’s reporting. Unfortunately it also introduced a lot of false positives.
• I helped track down what was happening (nakedret issue #11), and put together the fix (nakedret PR #12). The changes were accepted upstream, and snapd CI was fixed.