Desktop Team Updates - Monday 4th April 2022

[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 28th March 2022

[robert.ancell]

• Updated snapd to support new Appstream locations. PR1 and PR2.
• Added tests to snapd-desktop-integration (they are larger than the service themself!!).
• Interviewed candidate for WSL job.
• Fixed packagekit.dart not handling invalid enum values from dnf backend.
• Reviewed theme API fixes in snapd-glib.

[jibel]

WSL

• Make the launcher buildable directly from Visual Studio or MSBuild without requiring to run prepare-build. It’ll be much easier for first time contributors to start on the project.
• Testing 22.04LTS images
• Fixed livecd-rootfs to create missing groups.

[vanvugt]

• So many bugs answered and triaged…
  • Don’t worry, jammy is in good shape. We just have more users than we used to.
  • The top gnome-shell crashes people are reporting already have fixes on the way: LP#1964458, LP#1964037. Although there is another crash that people aren’t reporting as much which errors.ubuntu.com seems to suggest is more frequent.
  • Finally figured out why gnome-shell crashes in gtk_style_context_init when trying to recover from a disappeared Xwayland. Thanks Heather.
  • Backlog stats are here.
• Updated the login animation colour fix.
• Updated the jammy live session crash fix to cover more possible stack traces.
• Fixed uninitialized memory in mutter’s picking (input) logic. Landed upstream in mutter 42.1.
• Tested older Intel GPUs (Arrandale, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell) that switched drivers this week (i965 -> crocus) due to Mesa 22.0. All working well!
• The Nvidia dual-GPU-dual-monitor fix landed upstream in mutter 42.1.
  • Proposed as a distro patch for jammy while we wait for 42.1.
• Fixed conflicts from the above fix in triple buffering branches (!2087, !1968, !1441)
• Progressed with analysis of the password dialog key repeat bug.
• Helping out the OEM team with a new product.
• Fixed an issue in the ubuntu-dock memory bloat fix.
• Fixed a little vim bug.

[jbicha]

• Additions to the Jammy Release Notes
• Testing and reporting of the webkit/mesa bug affecting my Intel graphics
• Wrote a blog post about how to easily install a bunch of .deb’s like I needed to do to verify the mesa regression
• Ended up taking Seb’s advice to reduce parallel builds for webkit2gtk on amd64 since 2.36.0 hadn’t built successfully for a week.
• Completed the libgweather4 transition in Debian.
• Removed the GNOME Documents app from Ubuntu 22.04
• Filed a Feature Freeze Exception for libarchive 3.6.0
• Packaged the GTK4 library of colord-gtk (needed for gnome-control-center 42 which Simon has uploaded to Debian experimental)
• Looked briefly at gnome-control-center 42 and realized the Snap permission integration for the Applications panel no longer builds after the GTK4 switch. I believe Ubuntu is currently the only distro to enable this but I think it would be useful for at least Debian. (It does not add a dependency on snap.)
• Mentoring a new Debian contributor with packaging libshumate (which is a map display library, basically libchamplain modernized for GTK4)
• Misc. bugfixes and package updates

[jpnurmi]

Desktop Installler

• Finished the timezone map
• Fixed partitioning dialog layouts
• Fixed dropdown focus visuals
• Fixed button bar alignment
• Worked on the installation slides
• Prepared for partition gaps
• Tested a Subiquity update
• Adapted to an endpoint rename
• Marked drivers configured
• Proposed issue templates
• Finished geoclue.dart convenience API

[ashtonn]

• Started work on a GNOME overlay extension

[till-kamppeter]

• CUPS Snap: The promotion of snapd 2.55.0 into the stable channel is scheduled to happen tomorrow! core20 20220318 has made it to stable on March 30 already. Sergio Cazzolato has continued testing and found a bug in snapd, snapd considering the mere presence of a /var/cups/ directory in a Snap’s sandbox as it plugging cups and so sets CUPS_SERVER=/var/cups/cups.sock, but as this directory is standard part of all core Snaps now the variable gets always set, especially also in the CUPS Snap itself and in Snaps plugging cups-control and not cups, breaking those. @mvo has already posted a Pull request on snapd fixing this which already got merged and so it should be available in the edge channel (snapd 2.55.2+git188.ge21669c). During my testing I also found a nasty bug in the CUPS Snap and fixed it.
• cups-filters: continued with fixes and enhancements towards the cups-filters 2.x release: Especially bumped the version number to 2.0b1, the number of the first 2.x release planned and bumped the soname of libcupsfilters to 2, but also fixed the output of the pdftopdf() filter function when the landscape or orientation-requested options are used and when the auto-rotation of the input pages is suppressed (see also this great write-up from Brian Potkin about pdftopdf), renamed mupdftoraster() to mupdftopwg(), and adjusted the default output formats of rastertopwg() and ghostscript(). Backported the fixes on pdftopdf() to the 1.x branch and released cups-filters 1.28.14. This will go into Jammy.
• Retro-fitting Printer Application Snaps: Updated the HPLIP Printer Application to HPLIP 3.22.2, fixed bugs caused by GNU-TLS -> SSL transition of CUPS and PAPPL in all the 4 Printer Applications and in the CUPS Snap.
• Linux Application Summit 2022: My talk about the New Architecture for printing and scanning and the lightning talk to announce the Ubuntu Summit in Prague are both accepted. The full schedules are available now. Thanks, @hellsworth, for making me aware of the event and your work in the organization team!
• Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin: Submitted the proposal for an OpenPrinting micro-conference (the forth, we started in 2019 and also 2020 and 2021). This year should be live on stage again!
• GUADEC 2022 in Guadalajara, Mexico: Started planning my first time on a GUADEC, talked with @kenvandine and @seb128 about presentation formats (talk, workshop/BoF) and decided to propose a talk about GNOME requirements for the New Architecture of printing and scanning.
• Google Summer of Code 2022: Continued mentoring the early starters. Later today the time period for contributor applications will start.
• Bugs.

[cnihelton]

WSL

• Updated the slide show according to the assets delivered by the design team.
• Tested 22.04LTS images together with @jibel
• Implemented some small enhancements around rebooting the distro and extending CLI options.
• Pushed a PR to enable the CI build system to include the slide show build artifacts in the app bundle.
• Pushed a new PR to finally complete the integration between WSL Launcher, OOBE and the slide show application.
• Those are subject to further refinement upon further testing.

Ubuntu Desktop Installer

• Review a couple of PR’s.
• Investigated alternatives for keeping the installer window non-closable while Subiquity is still working in the background for WSL thanks to this PR

[seb128]

• did some extra fixes for use of the new logo
• bisected mesa to figure out why gl softwares were crashing under x11
• rebuilt intel-media-driver seems a libva update was ABI (incompatible](https://launchpad.net/bugs/1966571)
• reviewed the status of the GNOME translations on launchpad for outdated templates or import issues
• spent quite some time on launchpad doing bugs triaging
• debugged upgrades to 22.04 failing due to the graphical session closing during the upgrade which turned out to be a dbus packaging issue
• updated the gnome-initial-setup desktop override to use the right icon in ubuntu sessions

[hellsworth]

• This week was mostly about finishing the AD Whitepaper changes, which are all done and on to marketing.
• LAS: made the talks schedule, put the schedule in indico, other website updates, requested travel.
• 3 interviews
• hit a gnome-shell bug with xwayland. Thanks @vanvugt for all of your help

[oSoMoN]

firefox

• prepared and tested 99.0 RC2, due for release later today
  • cherry-picked a couple of upstream commits to fix FTBFS on ppc64el and s390x
  • updated unity-menubar.patch for bionic that was broken because of two independent upstream changes
• investigated the regression with drag’n’drop in the snap in jammy
  • it’s a snap-specific issue (although I’m not seeing the denials I would expect)
  • only affecting Wayland sessions (the default in jammy)
  • it also affects other snaps although it’s most visible in firefox
  • I tested a few downgrade/upgrade scenarii to confirm that the regression started happening when upgrading gnome-shell/mutter from 41.3 to 42
• native messaging portal integration
  • rebased my test portal packages on the latest version in jammy
  • reworked the implementation to be fully asynchronous (but I still need to figure out some issues with objects’ lifetime when passed back and forth from JS to C++)

thunderbird

• preparing updates for the 91.8.0 RC (already uploaded to jammy)

chromium

• updated beta then stable to 100.0.4896.60
• updated dev then beta to 101.0.4951.15

snaps

• submitted a pull request to allow the system-packages-doc interface read access to Xubuntu docs, which prompted a conversation on allowing more general access to all documentation under /usr/share/*-doc{,s}/