Desktop Team Updates - Monday 2nd August 2021

[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 .

Last week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates - Monday 26th July 2021

[robert.ancell]

• Implemented xz decoder support for Dart.
• Got Dart .deb parsing working. Will leave that for now until there’s a demand for more features.
• Tried new installer in a virtual machine using a canary image.
• Reviewed PRs for ubuntu-desktop-installer.
• Reviewed MRs for gnome-control-center.
• Started Dart client for fwupd.

[callmepk]

WSL OOBE

• the reconfiguration mode completed;
• original ubuntu-wsl-integration integration planning starting;
• initial PR created for subiquity.

[didrocks]

ADsys:

• Wrote integration tests using dynamic server fetch from sssd.

WSL:

• Finished the build script for daily & on demand builds.
• Documentation reading/conferences watching

Misc:

• Reviewed libnet-snmp-perl MIR
• Attending internal documentation session
• Candidate tech assessment reviews
• livecd-rootfs (multi-layer) + subiquity reviews
• Client debugging work

[jpnurmi]

Ubuntu Desktop Installer

• Merged the Who are you page
• Improved the Allocate disk space page
• Ensured that Subiquity server is stopped when the installer quits

WSL OOBE Wizard

• Implemented WSL endpoints and data classes for Subiquity client
• Connected the WSL endpoints with WSL wizard pages’ view models
• Finished view models, connected WSL endpoints, added tests, and docs for the WSL wizard pages (wsl-* feature branches)
• “Productized” the earlier wizard app split prototype

Flutter

• Investigated the window titlebar rendering issue (SSD works, CSD not)

[vanvugt]

• Lots of bug management in Launchpad and upstreams. Also closed a pile of old bugs [backlog stats]
• Reproposed the Ubuntu patch for the desktop-icons-ng startup bug (LP: #1936643)
• The rounded corners optimization landed upstream in mutter 41. This fixes apparent freezes in GNOME 40 on older Intel GPUs (Core 2, Atom N5xx and older).
• More progress on triple buffering support: simplified, improved documentation and removed the first attempt at Wayland support.
  • Work in progress on a second attempt at Wayland support. Fewer bugs than the first attempt but not 100% perfect yet.
• Proposed automated mode setting during direct scanout in Wayland sessions. This enables more apps to get direct scanout (skip GPU compositing for performance) when they’re fullscreen. It also unblocks deep colour support.

[till-kamppeter]

• CUPS Snap: Waiting for @ijohnson’s pull request on snapd for the cups printing interface to get merged by the snapd team.
• cups-filters: Extended the auto-creation of presets from the PPD files to be applied on combinations of of grayscale/color, print quality, and content type IPP attribute settings to also cover the print resolution and this way all options related to print quality. Also added a streaming mode to the ghostscript() and pdftopdf() filter functions and the foomatic-rip CUPS filter. In addition made ghostscript() also support Ghostscript’s PCLm and raster-only PDF output, but this is only of experimental character as the corresponding support in Ghostscript does not stream and does not support back side orientation for duplex printing. Fixed a bug in the pdftoraster() filter function grabbing input from stdin instead of the function’s input file descriptor blocking filter chains, got several contributions from the GSoC students. Several fixes and clean-ups, borderless printing support in PDF printer PPDs.
• Retro-fitting of classic CUPS drivers into Printer Applications: Continued on the driver retro-fit library code. This week’s new additions are a new print resolution handling, coupling it with draft/normal/high IPP print-quality setting, allowing chains of filter functions for data format conversions, and also running filter functions in their new streaming mode, where they do not store the whole job in a temporary file. Also started the design of support for including driver-specific CUPS backends.
• Ghostscript: Reported two bugs: raster-only PDF and PCLm output need seekable output device and PCLm does not support back side orientation for duplex printing
• Google Summer of Code 2021: Continued mentoring the students. Got the pdftopdf and pclmtoraster filter functions working without PPD files, good progress on the universal CUPS filter.
• Ubuntu Indabas: Planned participation in the end-of-August edition
• Bugs.

[oSoMoN]

I was on holidays for most of the past two weeks

firefox

• prepared 90.0.2 update, now published to all supported Ubuntu releases
• preparing 91.0 RC, scheduled for release next week
• snap built from source: ship and use encrypted API keys for Google Location Services, Google Safe Browsing, and Mozilla Location Services

chromium

• updating stable to 92.0.4515.131
• updating beta to 93.0.4577.18

snaps

• preparing RC builds for the 0AD alpha 25 upcoming release

Ubuntu Desktop Installer

• reviewed and merged pull requests

[laney]

• Started working on porting appstream.ubuntu.com’s deployment charm to modern tech (operator framework) for redeploying on a new cloud
• Plumbed through insensitivity for update-manager when showing ESM updates (see last week)

[3v1n0]

GNOME

• Lots of fixes, tests and improvements to the orientation manager improvements branch [MR]
• Addressed various review comments of monitors configuration manager cleanup branch [MR]
• Proposed the privacy screen MRs:
  • mutter
  • gsettings schemas
  • gnome-control-center
• Various fprintd / libfprint reviews.

[hellsworth]

This week was mostly about the July 30 Indaba. Thanks so much to @3v1n0 and Britt for being amazing guests

Other things I did:

• five-or-more snap changes
• gedit snap changes
• got LO 7.2.0 snap to successfully build!
• parallel local investigation to follow up with LO upstream bug I filed a couple of weeks ago. reverting the commit does work but is not the right solution. I’m currently tweaking the find command.