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.
Was a short two day week, some days off and travelling to FOSDEM on Friday
Laying some of the groundwork for autopkgtest migration to the new environment. With IS I worked out that deploying the new thing in parallel and cutting over is better than tearing down the old one and re-deploying the new in place. It requires some different work in advance (firewalls and stuff) so I have been doing a bit of that. Continuing this week.
OEM support in the desktop installer: started on the ubuntu-drivers part via TDD. Got some hardware to be able to test on a real system, but this isn’t strictly needed until later when we’ve got more bits in place. Tested focal a bit on it though.
IS asked why appstream.ubuntu.com isn’t SSL. Good point - worked on that quickly. Waiting for a firewall change to be able to deploy a 301 redirect and make everybody use SSL.
setup my very own ppa for libreoffice testing and got it building (had some space issues with ppa). getting to this point took a ton of trial-and-error but I learned a lot about building libreoffice.
Rebuilt glimpse-editor as needed (whenever it contained outdated ubuntu packages).
LAS organization: We’re planning on doing a co-location with some other conference so trying to sort out where/when (will be this Fall), working on updating the website with new theme, mission statement, etc.
Replaced the Python script to check whether the CUPS port 631 is occupied by a DEB-based CUPS by a C program
Moved the daemon handling scripts (start/stop/reload) into scripts/ subdirectory
Fixed font installation
Fixed Ghostscript resource directory paths
CUPS in a Snap: Investigated the problem of no D-Bus communication between the snap’s CUPS and the outside world. Concluded that “cups-control” interface needs to be extended and point to the CUPS snap. Unfortunately, I did not get any answer on this thread.
cups-filters: Worked with GSoC 2020 student candidates on bugs to evaluate them. By this got most filters working with zero-page input (to handle gracefully a page selection which eliminates all pages, Issue #117), several smaller bugs in the filters fixed and CJK text files correctly printing (Issue #135).
IPP-over-USB: Further tests on the ippusbxd replacement ipp-usb. Now it seems to work perfectly with my HP OfficeJet Pro 8730.
Google Summer of Code 2020: Continued to let student candidates work on assignments (like cups-filters bugs) to evaluate them for this year’s GSoC).
I had a hangout meeting with some of the snapd developers last week to track the progress of some of the pending pull requests. There will be another one this week.
I received code review on PR #7456 (session agent client library), and have fixed those issues.
I received a code review on PR #7588 (the snap routine portal-info command). I think the problems have been resolved. There was a query about some functionality only working on distros supporting AppArmor, but I think things should be fine at this point.
I’m working to update PR #5822 (daemons in the user session). I’ve got the old functionality running on top of current snapd master, taking into account functionality that has since been merged or implemented differently. I still have some cleanup to do, and implement the session agent calls to correctly restart user services on installs/upgrades/removals.
Gnome Shell:
Release bugs:
LibreOffice
Snaps
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firefox
chromium
other