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.
Deployed a branch to start populating the OEM meta set. Once someone on the team gets upload rights to the set, they will be able to self service uploads.
Reviewed ubiquity branch, still need to actually test it
Started researching what happens if you have ESM enabled and try to run update-manager, step 1: find out how it gets enabled. (See ubuntu-advantage-client in trusty if you’re interested.). Step 2 to be done next.
More testing of appstream-generator, still some aborts / crashes to sort out
Bit of light autopkgtest babysitting. We had two problems
Some ports became dangling and needed mopping up to be able to spawn the full amount of instances
s390x in one of the regions broke - thanks IS for fixing that back up
7.1 release: It works in every way except the desktop icons. I’m currently trying to root cause why. The snap is no longer creating the usr/share/icons/gnome dir for some reason and it might be just a different path in 7.1. Getting this out is my top priority.
update to gnome-3-38-2004 and core 20: Continued to peel the onion. Now I have a different build failure but likely the same icon issue The build failure is because the runtime path to the startcenter.desktop file doesn’t exist.
deb:
Tested 7.1 prereleases build and now it is in proposed. Thanks @ricotz!
Worked on epiphany build failure… turns out there is an internet connection issue due to an xdg-desktop-portal commit that needs to be fixed.
There are other failures (mostly arm64) that need investigation, as time permits.
prepared the 78.8.0 update for hirsute, and groovy and focal in a PPA
chromium
published a build with a snapcraft fix (not yet released to stable at the time) needed for the snap-based core desktop prototype, in the candidate/configure-hook-nofonts channel
investigated why beta 89 autopkgtests are failing for bionic builds only, but I failed to reproduce the failures locally
libreoffice
sponsored Rico’s 7.1.1 uploads (RC1 and RC2) to hirsute
followed up on a snapcraft PR I submitted to check that the platform snap is connected in desktop extensions and bail out early if not, it has now landed
updated thunderbird beta to 87.0b1 (which fixes the url handling issue reported with 86.0b3)
continued poking at libsecret in snap, wrote a small testcase and then verified it’s working with evince rebuilt with libsecret master (opening a protected pdf correctly store the secret in the snap private keyring)
Other
added an ‘oem’ mention to oem priority bugs on the SRU report
Monday was the Labour Day public holiday in Western Australia.
snapd:
snapd PR #9952 was merged, which updates the x11 interface’s plug AppArmor rules to give read access to the Xauthority files written by the development versions of KDE Plasma’s Wayland session.
Contributed some fixes to Alan’s snapd PR #8699 (add a desktop-launch interface).
Created snapd PR #9963, which installs the D-Bus service activation files for snap userd on Ubuntu Core 18+ systems. This is a prerequisite for making the desktop-launch interface usable on Ubuntu Core systems (such as the GDM experiment image we’ve been working on).
Updated snapd PR #9910 (user daemon support in snap services and snapctl services output) in response to review feedback. It’s now received two positive reviews, so I expect to merge it shortly.
Started work on some polkit file validator code that could be used as a basis for a polkit interface for snapd.
snapd-glib:
snapd-glib PR #97 was merged, updating the snapctl binding to give access to the exit code of commands. This is mostly for the benefit of calling snapctl is-connected.
other:
Provided a small amount of review feedback on Robert’s libsoup MR.
CUPS Snap: Committed the CUPS patch for checking administrative inquiries into the new OpenPrinting CUPS upstream repository after Michael Sweet has asked me to upstreamize the patches. Inline in the commit I had some discussion with Michael but he generally liked it. What he did not like is that for the check CUPS calls snapctl as external executable and this will not scale on 10000s of inquiries. I discussed with @jamesh (thanks for all your great work!) on Mattermost some minutes ago and concluded with him that with his new functionality no external executable is called and there should generally not be a performance problem then. Pasted the conversation into the commit’s inline discussion. Still waiting for the interface auto-connection approval, @alexmurray, thanks for making the start!
sane-airscan: Still waiting for the MIR to get reviewed by the security team. Feature Freeze for Hirsute has passed, and I had posted the MIR in time for Groovy already.
Feature Freeze for Hirsute: After a hint from QPDF author Jay Berkenbilt I updated to QPDF 10.2.0 right in time. Had to fix the autopkg tests of pikepdf for that. Also updated avahi with the last fixes from Debian.
Google Summer of Code 2021: Continued mentoring candidates on working on cups-filters and CUPS GitHub issues as part of the selection process.
Laptop refresh: USB-C monitor, wireless keyboard, and speakers work great with my old laptop (only one USB-C wire connected, no power supply), now it is time for the new laptop to arrive (@kenvandine received his already).
Update GDM to notify the greeter when the PAM stack selected an user [MR]
Some regression tests on riscv64 to check what’s blocking latest gjs there
Lots of tests with smartcard authentication and working to make it properly handle the user identification (prepared GDM pam config changes) and gnome-shell to adapt to it.
Fixed one OpenSC issue causing gnome-settings-daemon to crash in hirsute [MR]
Improved pam-sss to handle better certain cases
Fixed some fprintd incoherences causing invalid prints to be listed as enrolled and PAM module to be confused by that [MR]
Some work in the TOD branch to do better analysis of the drivers
Packaging
Uploaded new mutter 3.38 + wayland input thread support package to hirsute [3.38.3-3ubuntu1]
Uploaded gnome-shell to hirsute with various cherry-picks and to use desktop-icons-ng by default [3.38.3-3ubuntu1]
Libreoffice 7.1.x for 
The build failure is because the runtime path to the startcenter.desktop file doesn’t exist.
firefox
thunderbird
chromium
libreoffice
snaps