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.
Had some discussions with mpt and uploaded a version which installs hardware-enablement packages automatically without a UI to opt out. Pending further design, we might offer something inside the session to toggle this.
Fixed no background in the “install” session
Fixed no g-s-d (bad fonts etc) in the “install” session
Got designs and worked a bit on the RST / Bitlocker UI, coming soon
testing various versions of LO to try and find where libreoffice help failure started. Seems to be specific to 6.4.X in ubuntu only. so now i’m looking into differences between our 6.4.2 and debian’s for clues.
LAS: wrote proposal to co-locate with SFScon in Italy in November for GNOME and KDE boards to review
libmtp: My patch for the UDEV rules to make USB printers not get “audio” group ownership got applied upstream, in Debian, and also the Ubuntu package got uploaded (thanks, @seb128).
cups-filters: More thoughts about the further development towards Printer Applications. As CUPS will drop PPD support soon I am thinking about moving all PPD functionality of libcups into a new libppd, to allow for legacy driver conversion into Printer Applications with a minimum need of new code.
ghostscript: Re-introduced the -O3 exception for ppc64el again, as the upstream fix of gcc got withdrawn due to a regression (see bug 1862053).
SANE: Made the two maintainers of the “escl” and “airscan” join their projects!! (see thread on GitLab) Also did a lot of testing for WSD (Microsoft’s Web Services for Devices) support by the “airsane” driver on my HP OfficeJet 8730 Pro. With my feedback all the problems got fixed and my device is now perfectly scanning with both eSCL (Apple AirScan) and WSD and probably 100s of other multi-function devices, too.
PAPPL: The Printer Application Framework from Michael Sweet is progressing. There is a test frontend now and one can enter the web interface and both the web interface and the IPP printer emulation get DNS-SD-advertised, but the printer emulation is not actually working yet.
Avahi: Updated the README files of ippusbxd and ipp-usb telling that one needs Avahi 0.8.0 to get the service on localhost advertised or one can alternatively patch older versions.
Google Summer of Code 2020: Introduced the students to their projects and helped them to create their proposals. 5 students have done their assignments successfully and posted good proposals so that we will ask for slots for them. There are some more candidates for OpenPrinting who did not convince us and so we will drop them. With these 5 students and the great work of Michael Sweet and Alexander Pevzner we will get most of the work needed for IPP-based printing and scanning done. Tomorrow (March 31) is deadline for student applications at Google.
I believe snapd PR #5822 (support for user session daemons) is now in a state ready to land. All review feedback from Samuele has been addressed, and I tracked down the intermittent failure in the spread tests.
The intermittent failure was caused by another test not properly cleaning up after itself. If it ran before any of my tests, we’d hit a failure. If it ran afterwards, everything passed. I split the fix for this failure out into snapd PR #8385 so it can be landed independently of the user daemons changes.
I’m currently working to rebase the top level dbus-activation branch now.
snapd xdg-desktop-portal integration:
In the discussion on x-d-p PR #443 it was suggested that it would be useful to have a “file access” command to identify host system paths that a snap can access without being proxied by the document portal.
I put together snapd PR #8356 as a start on this. It implements a snap routine file-access command that behaves similar to the flatpak info --file-access command. It has unit tests, but needs a spread test to verify that it works in practice.
Once matching support is added to xdg-document-portal, this would mean that e.g. using a portal file chooser to select a file in the user’s home directory would return the real path if the snap had plugged the home interface.
Misc snapd work:
The snapd devs have been moving some of the CI workflows over to Github Actions. I made a couple of small contributions in snapd PR #8374 and snapd PR #8375.
The approach suggested by @jdstrand is to have cupsd make call outs to snapd to decide whether to process administrative requests.
After reading over that thread, I believe a different approach would be better: implement polkit support into cupsd. This would solve a few extra problems (e.g. allow passwordless administration by members of the host system’s lpadmin group), and would likely be useful to all other Linux distros. This second point is important if we want to convince Apple to take the patches.
At present, the thread is waiting on feedback from Jamie. I’m willing to give Till further pointers as needed.
Gnome Shell:
Housekeeping:
firefox
thunderbird
chromium
snaps
other