Desktop Team Updates - Monday 2nd March 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 24th February 2020

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:desktop_computer: Gnome Shell:

:house: Focal house keeping:

:chart_with_downwards_trend: Backlog tracking

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firefox24 firefox

chromium22 chromium

package24 other

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  • travelled to Frankfurt to join a Canonical engineering sprint
  • Ubuntu focal work
    • GNOME 3.35 updates
    • Sponsored the new bluez for Daniel
    • Upload the new pulseaudio rc version
    • Backported a n-m-openvpn upstream change to allow specifying the tls versions
    • Updated network-manager to the current stable version
    • Updated modemmanager to the current upstream serie
    • Updated geoclue to the current version
  • proposed migration
    • Rebuilds and fixes for the new poppler and gnome-desktop3
    • Reverted a glib-networking commit to fix libsoup tests
    • Demoted some unmaitained packages to proposed to unblock the new libfprintf
    • Fixed libvisual autopkgtest on i386
    • Sponsored the unity updates for the new gnome-desktop
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Zsys:

  • Promoted to main and seeded now that the MIR was approved. \o/
  • Released0.4.1 which contains all previous weeks new commands and enhancements.
  • Hook up snapshots to apt upgade/install/remove.
  • Remove eoan compatibility binary and adapt zfs generator to it in 0.8.3-1ubuntu4 as well as grub detection 2.04-1ubuntu21 (+ grub2-signed).
  • Fix initramfs to handle zsys snapshot user properties scheme while still being compatible with manual snapshots in 0.8.3-1ubuntu5.
  • Fix generated state name sent to clients.
  • Fix armhf build.
  • Multiple ubiquity regressions fix and install zsys by default in 20.04.6:
    • Fix ZFS installation on MBR system now that partman-auto always creates an ESP.
    • Fix the display of the partition layout on ZFS installation in Ubiquity.
    • Install zsys when ZFS installation is selected.
    • Remove userobj_accounting from zpool features. It is not supported by GRUB when reverting on a snapshot.

Misc:

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  • Zsys:
    • snapshots on apt operations
    • profiling and performance improvements
    • various fixes here and there. Check VCS for details
    • Fixes to Ubiquity:
      • Fix ZFS installation on MBR system now that partman-auto always creates an ESP.
      • Fix the display of the partition layout on ZFS installation in Ubiquity.
      • Install zsys when ZFS installation is selected.
      • Remove userobj_accounting from zpool features. It is not supported by GRUB when reverting on a snapshot.
  • More stats for customers
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Snapcraft Snaps

  • Landed deb2snap transitions in ubuntu-release-upgrader.
    • Always install seeded snaps that don’t replace debs.
    • Don’t remove unseeded snaps that are being used by other snaps.
    • Install deb2snap.json for sharing with update-manager.
  • Prepared an MR for deb2snap transitions in update-manager.
    • Use the deb2snap.json file from ubuntu-release-upgrader.
    • Don’t install seeded snaps unless its deb is marked for deletion.
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  • Reviewed Marcus’s deb2snap work in ubuntu-release-upgrader, uploaded that - good work
  • Proposed ubiquity and ubuntu-drivers-common branches for the OEM support work (see previous status) (ubiquity is still awaiting the design)
  • Landed Shell 3.35.91 and friends
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snapd dbus activation:

  • PR #5822, implementing support for user session systemd daemons is progressing through review. I got it to a stage where I can demonstrate that user daemons are being started and stopped on snap install/remove via the session agent.
  • I rebased PR #6258 (the actual dbus activation PR) on current master. The main tasks remaining for this branch are:
    1. adjust to the agreed snap.yaml syntax (changing activate-on to activates-on)
    2. gate behind a feature flag so we can merge before having the feature enabled by default.
    3. require that activates-on only be used with daemons. As well as ensuring we can control their lifecycle, this avoids the use of dbus-daemon-launch-helper, which uses a different config file parser to dbus-daemon.

snapd portals support:

  • One feature of PR #7588 was to indicate whether the snap has network access, which could in turn be used to restrict access to the org.freedesktop.portal.NetworkMonitor APIs, similar to what happens with Flatpaks. It was pointed out that this was closer to the (currently unusable on classic) network-status interface. I changed the keyfile output from HasNetwork to HasNetworkStatus to indicate this, but still check for the network interface for now.
  • I put together PR #8215 to make the network-status interface usable on classic. I’ve ripped out the Ubuntu Phone era AppArmor rules since (a) it doesn’t look like anything is using it, and (b) the rules appeared to be broken (they grant access on the system bus, while the indicator-network API was provided on the session bus).
  • I put together xdg-desktop-portal PR #442 to add AssumedAppArmorLabel keys to the D-Bus service files. This allows snaps to activate the portal service automatically via a method call. This hadn’t shown up previously because the GLib portal integration code uses StartServiceByName, which doesn’t trigger the problem.

Traveled to Frankfurt for engineering sprint. I had fun wandering around on the Sunday before getting to work: https://photos.app.goo.gl/8jTcN8AEzYViPPmx6

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