Desktop Team Updates - Monday 29th August 2022

Project Discussion Desktop
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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 .

Last week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates - Monday 22nd August 2022

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  • Landed gnome-control-center 43 Beta in Ubuntu 22.10 and Debian Unstable.
  • Disabling gnome-control-center’s new Device Security feature in Ubuntu and Debian since it’s not ready for our users.
  • Filed some bugs about the sound alert feature
     
  • Coordinated the landing of GNOME Shell 43 Beta in Ubuntu 22.10
  • Started the mega GNOME 43 libsoup3-related library transitions in Ubuntu 22.10. This includes transitions for evolution-data-server, geocode-glib, gnome-online-accounts, librest, and snapd-glib. The transition will take at least several days to complete.
  • :warning: Warning :warning: Some people like to run -proposed during a development release. I strongly urge you not to do this in general but especially right now. Until all the components are rebuilt, apps will be broken. If you install the wrong combination of things, you could end up not being able to log into your normal Ubuntu or GNOME sessions.
     
  • Removed several apps that aren’t compatible with the new libraries.
  • Found and fixed in advance a Ubiquity bug triggered by the mega transition.
  • Helped test the new snapd-glib library built with libsoup3
  • Ported our gnome-online-accounts patches to work with meson
     
  • Also switched tracker and geoclue-2.0 to libsoup3 since they appear to not cause conflicts for apps using them.
  • Enabled the GTK4 version of the mini gnome-bluetooth-sendto app after figuring that it works well enough now. (It’s used in the GNOME Settings app to power a button you can click to send files to a paired Bluetooth device.) This has landed in Ubuntu 22.10 and will land in Debian Unstable soon.
  • Helped expedite a gnome-control-center update to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to fix several annoying issues
     
  • Removed GNOME To Do from the Ubuntu 22.10 default install following discussion
  • Announcing our decision to stick with GNOME Terminal as the default terminal app for Ubuntu 22.10 since GNOME Console has regressions related to its switch to GTK4 and still needs some more Ubuntu integration work.
  • After main inclusion was approved, enabled eog and shotwell viewer to open webp images
     
  • Lots of packaging work before Ubuntu 22.10 Feature Freeze today.
  • Miscellaneous archive admin and main/universe management tasks. Thank you to the Archive Admins and MIR teams for their help.
  • The only GNOME 43 things that aren’t in at least -proposed for Ubuntu 22.10 yet, from what I can see, are
    • gnome-text-editor because it needs review of a new dependency
    • gcr4 because it’s easier to finish the other library transitions first
    • rygel and friends. These are less well-known libraries and services that are more complicated because of how they are used by other apps, not all of which have switched to libsoup3 yet.

Other News

  • Simon was able to get mozjs102 building on armhf which allows us to switch Ubuntu’s gjs to use it. It still fails to build on armel which is a problem for Debian.
  • Ubuntu 20.04.5 is scheduled for release next week. So please help with ISO testing release candidates next week.
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  • Verified gnome-control-center SRUs.
  • Reported Snapcraft --verbosity CLI option bug (tracked in JIRA).
  • Rewrote a disabled patch (pin-pointed by Diddledani, thanks!) to make GTK3 pass tests again.
  • Submitted compatibility patches for a couple of Nautilus extensions.
  • Updated Ghex, Glade and Babl in Debian with Jbicha.
  • [Chromium VAAPI] Doing quite of a rework of snapcraft.yaml with Olivier so that it’s more reliable.
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Workshops

Desktop Installer

Subiquity

Flutter

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Steam Snap

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  • sponsored a pipewire SRU from the oem team to fix cheese video freezing on some devices
  • enabled the wired option in iwd and fixed a build issue
  • sponsored the GTK build fix from Nathan
  • helped things to land from the archive admin side
  • packaged git snapshots of the newer modemmanager/libqmi/libmbim for hwe but tests are failing with the new glib and it needs more work now
  • included a network-manager config in iwd to make it the default backend when installed
  • updated network-manager to install iwd by default now that the MIR is reviewed but kept since in proposed the time to investigate why it seems to fail to auth using stored password
  • pushed the casper script including the tweaks for the canary image for review
  • worked on an extra casper change to specify for the canary image to use the hwe kernel which should fix installations without working internet
  • reported the glib-networking test failure upstream and backported a candidate fix
  • removed ubuntu sso patches from gnome-online-accounts which aren’t needed anymore, livepatch is done through ubuntu advantage now and snap-store doesn’t use goa for snapd nowadays, we should be able to sync the package in the futur
  • removed the deprecated ubuntu-logo plymouth theme, we use spinner now
  • helped with some of the firefox snaps issues around speech-dispatcher
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  • cups-filters: More testing, bug-fixing, and implementing of written up improvement ideas before the 2.0b1 release (now it is getting close): Replaced all assert() calls in the 3 libraries (libfontembed, libcupsfilters, libppd) by macros to only be actual assert() calls when the DEBUG macro is set, to avoid automatic bug reports (apport) in production use (coomit). Correctly check final output type to determine which filter does the page logging (commit). Page logging for PostScript output (commit). compare MIME type strings case-insensitively in the cfFilterUniversal() filter function (commit). When generating a printer IPP attributes record from the PPD file, make sure that all attributes concerning custom page size are included (commit). Import template directory name when calling cfFilterBannerToPDF() via cfFilterUniversal() (commit). Let ppdFilterPDFToPS() correctly determine the print resolution (commit). Improvements on getting printer IPP attributes from PPD, on attributes printer-resolution, device-uri, document-format-supported, print-content-optimize-supported, media-col-ready, media-ready, removed irrelevant code about supply levels (commit)
  • cups-filters: Released cups-filters 1.28.16 with bug fixes and improvements back-ported from 2.x.
  • PAPPL: In several Printer Applications I observed that they hiked up to taking 100% CPU after some simple operations (identify printer, print test page, …) and stay that way. I investigated whether it could perhaps be caused by the massive changes on cups-filters 2.x, but it turned out that the problem also occurs with PAPPL’s sample Printer Application and so it is a PAPPL bug (I hope it is not an Avahi bug, but there would be little hope of a fix now).
  • system-config-printer: After half a year of collecting translations from WebLate and also some bug fixes, I released version 1.5.17.
  • Feature Freeze: On last Thursday there was Feature Freeze for the Kinetic Kudo. Updated some Ubuntu packages for which there are new upstream versions: Ghostscript 9.56.1, CUPS 2.4.2, cups-filters 1.28.16, system-config-printer 1.5.17,
  • OpenPrinting: Deployed Printer Application look-up service for printer setup tools on the OpenPrinting web server for printer/driver look-ups. Did some tests and everything works as expected. Printer Application Snaps installed on the server find the correct drivers for the given printer device ID and the user (or better the printer setup tool) get as answer a hierarchy list of what are the best Printer Applications which support the printer and with which internal driver. Passed this on to the GSoC contributors working on the GNOME Control Center, so that they make use of it.
  • Printer Applications under WSL: In the description in my write-up added a video link to my first public presentation of this idea.
  • Avahi: There is now some hope that Avahi gets maintained again! Adrian Cable has reported this important bug and volunteers for maintenance work!
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: Continued mentoring the 7 contributors for OpenPrinting. Usual online chats on Telegram and video meetings.
  • OpenPrinting: Quarterly meeting about the relationships between OpenPrinting and the Linux Foundation, with Jeff Licquia and Kate Stewart from the Linux Foundation.
  • Bugs.
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Azure Active Directory

  • Debug GDM with wayland not starting session after aad. Turned out the issue is due to Golang exported C library which is multi-threaded and the NSS clients loading it calls fork without exec, dumping thus the other threads in the child process. It means we need to circumvent this by creating a pure C library calling a Go CLI.
  • Lot of reviews of Gabriel’s and Denison’s PRs.

Misc

  • Review *-perl MIRs dependencies for lintian.
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firefox24 firefox

thunderbird24 thunderbird

  • uploaded 102.2.0+build3 to kinetic
  • prepared 91.13.0+build1 update for all other supported series
  • started preparing the 102 update for all supported series in a PPA

chromium22 chromium

flutter24 Unofficial Ubuntu Store

package24 other

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WSL

  • Moved the Flutter commands to build the slide show application from the CI workflow into MSBuild. That will make a lot easier to switch between the slide show and the new OOBE. WSL/#269
  • Implemented the support in Subiquity for a flag to enable users opting out of installing language packs during setup. Both server and TUI have the feature. Subiquity/#1390
  • Submitted a pull request to add that feature in the Flutter GUI as well. UDI/#1095
  • Reviewed two pull requests that speeds up Subiquity integation tests. Subiquity/#1392 and 1399
  • Implemented a splash screen animation for the OOBE running on Windows on reconfiguration mode, when the GUI would render a black screen for a couple of seconds until the server could respond to any requests. UDI/#1086

For this week I’ll keep working on the WSL build system to integrate the Flutter OOBE on Windows to finally be able to implement the end-to-end testing workflow.

UDI

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snaps

Misc

  • booked flight to Prague
  • Setup September Indaba on core22, snapcraft, and potentially Ubuntu Core
  • Scheduling November Indaba (the release process) to be in person in Prague! Thanks @seb128 for being willing and for the in person suggestion!
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This was a slow week with few demonstrabe results, but valuable experience that will help future decision making.

  • Learning how to run systemd’s autopkgtests in Ubuntu Desktop and in VirtualBox, with lots of help from the Foundations team!
  • Exploring options on how to get basic telemetry (number of Ubuntu WSL users) using Window’s tools.
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