Desktop Team Updates - Monday 27th July 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 20th July 2020

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:desktop_computer: Gnome Shell and friends:

:chart_with_downwards_trend: Bug tracking:

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firefox24 firefox

chromium22 chromium

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  • Worked on installing special OEM enablement sauce in the session
    • Current plan is to have update-notifier run ubuntu-drivers list-oem, before launching update-manager (this bit is done)
    • and then have update-manager read this and finish the installation off (but it’ll also have to look for any “half installed” packages) (not done)
  • Joined the archive team(!!!) and did a few things there
  • Couple more fixes to proposed-migration, like improving our linux kernel special handling
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  • +1 maintainance shift (email with details)
  • G serie
    • updates: gnome-disk-utility, gnome-desktop, network-manager, libdmapsharing, gnome-chess
    • syncs and merges from Debian
  • SRU
    • some focal verifications
  • Sponsoring
    • reviewed bluez fixes from the OEM team
  • other
    • updated the thunderbird snap to the new 78.0.1 version
    • spent some time figuring out why snap was having issue on an outdated bionic xubuntu system (not autorefresh there)
    • triaging of launchpad bugs and e.u.c reports
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GNOME Stuff

  • Updates to the shell stylesheet cleanup branch, which fixes some crashes and got user testing again [MR]
  • Joined a bit online GUADEC sessions
  • Got in touch with mutter upstream to look in implementing the xdg-session-management protocol that would allow restarting a gnome-shell wayland session without loosing current apps.
  • Started the work for ePrivacy panel support:
    • Got a new nice ThinkPad to play with
    • Installed groovy on that, recompiled the mainline (+ubuntu config) kernel with the eprivacy DRM patches
    • Hacked a bit the thinkpad_acpi module to improve a bit the patches
    • Done some tests with X11 and Wayland
    • Started the KMS implementation (wayland), after some discussion on Jonas, as per its coming atomic-KMS support (on which I’m basing now).

Distro work

  • Uploaded new stable release 3.36.4 of mutter and gnome-shell to debian, groovy and focal [+ SRUs duties]
  • Some SRU verifications and bug triaging
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  • I spent my time mostly in GUADEC (Wed-Fri) and wrote some notes to share with the team.
  • Also did some SRUs
  • Libreoffice 6.4.5 build for groovy in ppa and run autopkgtests
  • closed LO bug about snap needing Hungarian
  • setup rpi 4
  • working on building network-manager snap with netplan plugin patch. was working but seems some things have changed in the snap so now it breaks… looking into this
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  • Printer Applications: Continued the studies about retro-fit of classic drivers and PostScript PPD files and also of making use of the code of cups-filters for filters in Printer Applications. Started discussion about future needs of PostScript support, at least according to Michael Sweet PostScript is obsolete and PostScript support not needed any more for new printers.
  • CUPS Snap: Still no progress on the snapd implementation of the new interfaces.
  • cups-filters: Added log file length limitation support for cups-browsed from student candidate for the Linux Foundation Mentorship program. Fixed margins when PostScript file (and not PDF) is sent to CUPS.
  • Google Summer of Code 2020: Continued mentoring work, answered student’s questions, explained them what is needed, … One of the 7 OpenPrinting students has withdrawn, after a family emergency and not so great work in his first month. He worked on IPP Scan support (needed for snapped scanner drivers). We are re-opening the project in the Linux Foundation Mentorship Program. Also second evaluations started today.
  • Linux Foundation Mentorship Program: Selected two students for our first project, one two make a Printer Application to fit in proprietary classic printer drivers and one to add iPP Fax Out support. Both will work for three months, Aug-Oct. I introduced them already to their work and started mentoring. We have applied for running a project to add IPP Scan support (the one which failed in GSoC) and got it approved. Two students will work on it Sep-Nov (so we will get more work force than originally planned in GSoC!).
  • Linux Plumber’s Conference 2020 (Virtual): OpenPrinting micro-conference got accepted. Conference is on August 24 - 28 2020, on “the wider Internet”.
  • Bugs.
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  • ZSys:
    • Triage bugs to identify biggest blocker (plan releasing this week)
    • Test minimizing GC time impact on various configuration (only keeping one month) until there is GC disk pressure on the schedule. Pushed it to master
    • Start looking at missing bpool import making postinst failing
  • Read a lot of documentation about:
    • TPM
    • AD Integration (still some to be read)
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snapd dbus activation:

  • snapd PR #8861 (install dbus-daemon configuration to search for service activation files in /var/lib/snapd/dbus-1) was merged. Almost immediately it caused spread test failures for others, which were fixed with core PR #114 which is also merged. I’m not sure why it didn’t show up in testing of my branch, but I suspect it was actually testing code in trunk rather than the changes in the PR.
  • snapd PR #8943 (install service activation files) rebased on master and marked ready for review. This is the final part after splitting the old PR, and is down to +848/-14 lines, with almost half of that being spread tests. All tests are passing in CI (which .

snapd theme support:

  • snapd PR #9043, which refactors the REST API access control routine into smaller composable checkers is set to be ready for review. All tests are passing in CI.
  • I’ve made a store request to enable auto-connect and greedy plug behaviour for the gtk-2-themes and gtk-3-themes slots on the gtk-common-themes and gtk-theme-traditionalhumanized snaps. Assuming things behave as expected, this should do the following:
    • installing gtk-theme-traditionalhumanized on a system should cause it to connect to all the snaps gtk-common-themes was connected to.
    • installing new application snaps afterwards should connect to both snaps’ slots.

Pulse Audio snap policy module:

  • Had an initial dig into bug 1886854. Not yet sure of the root cause, so still investigating.

Guadec:

  • Watched a few recordings of talks from this year’s Guadec. Unfortunately, pretty much all the talks were scheduled for when I’m usually sleeping, so haven’t watched anything live.
  • It looks like a lot of the recordings are either private or missing on the BigBlueButton instance, so I guess I’ll wait for it all to be uploaded to YouTube. I provided some scripts that should help automate the export and rendering process.
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  • Working on Dart D-Bus code generation.
  • Moved dbus_client.dart from ‘CanonicalLtd’ to ‘canonical’.
  • Enabled Travis CI for dbus_client.dart
  • Enable asynchronous method handling in dbus_client.dart
  • Various dbus_client.dart tidy-ups.
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