Desktop Team Updates – Monday 3rd April 2023

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 .

Last week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates – Monday 27th March 2023

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  • Packaged GNOME 44.0 for Ubuntu 23.04 and Debian Experimental
  • Did ISO testing for yesterday’s Ubuntu 23.04 Beta release
  • During ISO testing, I had a lot of trouble with GNOME Boxes 44.0 not setting virtual machine memory correctly. Thankfully, Seb reported the issue upstream and this is fixed in GNOME Boxes 44.1 which will be rolling out soon.
     
  • Fixed a bug in the librest packaging that prevented GNOME Maps from launching in Ubuntu MATE 23.04 Beta
  • Fixed a remaining issue for the missing Mouse & Touchpad art in the Settings app affecting Ubuntu 23.04 Beta
  • Cherry-picked Daniel’s proposed riscv fix for gnome-shell and a fix for installing GNOME Shell extensions using the extension apps with GNOME Shell 44.0.
     
  • Epiphany 44 (freshly converted to gtk4) landed in Ubuntu 23.04 after the FFE was approved and thanks to Gianfranco for help in getting webkitgtk 2.40 in to Ubuntu 23.04.
  • Worked with Berto and the Debian Release Team to get webkitgtk 2.40 in to Debian Bookworm. This involved a small transition for the gtk4 version of the library. We will probably need to copy that work for Ubuntu 22.10.
  • Worked with Dmitry to update the sphinx autopkgtests for webkitgtk 2.40.
     
  • Added svgpp to Ubuntu’s “big packages” autopkgtest group, allowing us to sync the package from Debian.
  • Did some triaging of GNOME Shell search provider crashes: GNOME Notes & GNOME Characters, both triggered by glib 2.76 getting stricter. Similar issue affecting backspace in GNOME Shell 43 search, which is noticeably affecting Arch Linux. Arch now has a pattern of not upgrading to a new GNOME major release until .1 (which means that Ubuntu has been getting the new GNOME series faster than Arch), but in this case, Arch Linux developers immediately pushed glib 2.76.

Other News

  • corectrl is in Debian’s NEW queue now
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  • Lots of bug triage and user support in Launchpad and upstreams. Backlog stats are here. This is taking up even more time than usual as we approach release.
  • Helped with one partner project this week.
  • Proposed a tiny fix for the dash-to-dock settings dialog.
  • Digging deeper into failures to resume from sleep on Intel GPUs (1, 2) to see if they’re related.
  • Work in progress on my booting to a black screen issue.
  • The multi-monitor screen freeze fix landed upstream in mutter 44.1. Also fixed a conflict in triple buffering that it created.
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Firmware updater

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  • cups-filters: Everything of cups-filters 2.x has landed in Ubuntu 23.04 now!!! (March News) Thanks a lot to Canonical’s security team, especially @eslerm for his last-minute review on cups-browsed and @sarnold and @aburrage for expediting the security reviews for the MIR and @seb128 for nagging the security team. CPDB has not yet landed in Main, but cups-filters 2.x is already a great step to get it tested (still with the old architecture). And I already got bug reports and fixed the bugs, small glitches, as setting correct page size when PPD has duplicate sizes with different names (commit), color printer and grayscale as default color mode (commit), and cups-browsed sending PDF when both PDF and Apple Raster are supported (printer’s PDF interpreters are often slow and buggy, commit). Also got some first (potential) security bug reports from the security team, resulting from their Coverity scans.
  • libcups 3.x: With the first piece of CUPS 3.x released as first beta mid-February I did the first test. I gave to a GSoC candidate the assignment to make libcupsfilters build and work with the user’s choice of libcups2 or libcups3 and the candidate succeeded. He posted this pull request! And this also showed me that I did absolutely right with my splitting of cups-filters. libcupsfilters was very easy to port to libcups3, it only needed some renaming of functions, no missing functionality in libcups3 and PPD file support correctly separated out. Michael Sweet’s documentation is always great! First thoughts in the March News.
  • Common Print Dialog Backends: The MIRs (Libraries, CUPS backend, File backend) are only missing the review by the security team but are otherwise completed. Unfortunately they did not make it into Main in 23.04 but will do in 23.10. For the application-specific print dialogs backends I have already a GSoC contributor candidate and for his work I contacted the respective upstreams: Mozilla, LibreOffice, and Chromium (Google’s Paper I/O Team). For LibreOffice there was already a GSoC project in which CPDB-support got added to print dialog, provided this to the contributor, too.
  • Linux App Summit 2023 in Brno: Posted the third teaser in my March news post. Before my talk on Sat, April 22, 16:35 CEST I will have an (informal, not in the schedules) meeting (most probably 15:00 CEST, everyone can join) with (most probably) Zdenek Dohnal (Red Hat printing), Marek Kasik (GNOME/GTK printing), Albert Astals Cid (KDE/Qt printing), and Harald Sitter (KDE/Qt).
  • GUADEC 2023 in Riga, Latvia: Submitted a talk to demo the current printing GUI development and also a workshop in snapping for beginners (together with @hellsworth). Deadline for submissions has passed right now. Hope that we got enough submissions now after one week of extension of the CfP. And if all works fine we get a snappy conference! See also the March News.
  • Google Summer of Code 2023: We had 2 weeks of time for the contributor candidates to submit their proposals. Helped the candidates to write their proposals, reviewed them, and assured that everyone actually submitted them and did last juggling of subjects and candidates so that as many projects as possible get covered and not having everyone competing for the same project. If all works fine, we will have all our initial project ideas covered! Currently, the candidates are preparing for their projects, I am contacting non-OpenPrinting upstreams for those whose work is taking place in such projects. See also in the March News.
  • OpenPrinting: March News Post. Highlights are: cups-filters 2.0b4 in Ubuntu 23.04, GSoC 2023, libcupsfilters and libcups 3.x
  • OpenPrinting: Monthly video meeting. Discussed GSoC and content for OpenPrinting Summit/PWG Meeting 2023, May 16-18 (virtual, everyone can join).
  • OpenPrinting: Started thoughts about whether to run the 2023 OpenPrinting micro-conference on Linux Plumbers in Richmond, VA or on the Open Source Summit Europe in Bilbao, Spain.
  • Bugs.
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  • cherry picked accountsservices changes to fix a segfault
  • reverted software-properties changes to enable Ubuntu Pro in Lunar, the service is not ready
  • updated iwd to the current upstream version
  • updated thunderbird to 102.9.1 and migrated the packaging vcs to git
  • continued work on the new installer daily ISO CI, got a working desktop provisioning and submitted the changes for review
  • Lunar beta testing
  • updated the subiquity apport hook to include desktop installer information
  • fixed incorrect compat symlinks in the ubuntu fonts update
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