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.
Usual autopkgtest maintenance; one cloud region went out … followed up with IS
Some other debugging of a couple of packages in autopkgtest that broke things, needed to be helped to fail properly
Re-followed up on this thread from July about renaming the Regression Potential section in SRUs to be more clear [the follow up is not actually sent, but will be very soon].
Raspberry Pi images: Looked into removing cloud-init completely; the only thing we need it for is resizing the root partition to fill the SD card/drive. But this can be done with cloud-initramfs-growroot. Well, it can in theory. But that somehow breaks first boot and you get an initramfs prompt which I’ve been attempting to debug. Something to do with udev. Been looking into that. @waveform@Wimpress
Some looking into Groovy’s default wallpapers - coming soon!
cups-filters: Converted CUPS’ cups-driverd daemon helper utility into a library function in libppd. It manages collections of PPDs and can assign the correct PPD to a discovered printer (identified by make, model, device ID). This is needed to easily retro-fit classic printer drivers into Printer Applications. After testing all its functionality I will commit it. Update:Committed
cups-filters: Released version 1.28.3 upstream and uploaded this one to Ubuntu, to get the problem of the driverless utility not always resolving DNS-SD-based CUPS device URIs solved for the Groovy beta.
pnm2ppa: Uploaded 1.13+nondbs-0ubuntu7 with fix overtaken from Red Hat and Debian, due to FTBFS on second Groovy test rebuild.
ipp-usb, sane-airscan: Still waiting for the security team to verify the MIRs for ipp-usb and sane-airscan.
Linux Foundation Mentorship Program: Mentoring the two IPP Scan students (Client, Server).
Google Season of Docs 2020: Mentoring our technical writer, doing corrections and received and accepted the first pull request.
I was off Monday for the Queen’s Birthday public holiday.
Ubuntu Core GDM experiment
With the new pc-kernel snap update, I was able to build an image with multiple base snaps (in this case, the root file system and core20) that would actually seed.
I had trouble getting the desktop session to talk to the snapped network-manager though: it seems the snap interface does not allow use of the org.freedesktop.DBus.ObjectManager API.
I also managed to get a version of the system group membership proposal working on the image: namely, adding an extrausers user account to the read-only sudo group.
“snapctl is-connected” improvements
I’ve been working on an update for snapd PR #9132 to allow checks by AppArmor profile name in addition to pid. On supported systems, this should provide a race free alternative to process ID lookups.
I handed off the patch for the security bug I was working on to the security team for release.
worked on LO segfault with gcc10 a bit. Turns out I couldn’t get the build failure on armhf groovy server because both gcc9 and gcc10 are installed. If I remove gcc9 though, the build does fail… just not the segfault I was expecting. Will ask for some guidance to move forward.
Network Manager
wrote test cases for netplan (currently in an internal google doc), working with Lukas to refine them. This included lots of research on supported settings in n-m, netplan, and what customers are using to come up with good test cases.
Working on refining PYTHONPATH change in snapcraft. the implementation has changed a few times but we’re nearly there, just needs some testing and should be merged this week.
firefox
thunderbird
chromium
