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.
prepared 70.0.1+build1 update and handed over to the security team for publication
thunderbird
uploaded 68.2.1+build1 to focal
prepared update to 68.2.1+build1 (eoan and bionic) with corresponding dependencies (mozilla-devscripts, jsunit, enigmail) and handed over to the security team for publication
chromium
fixed a failure to start the snap if the ~/.chromium-browser.init file exists but the personal-files interface isn’t connected
cleaned up unneeded stage files from the snap, trimming the size of the snap down by 5MB (amd64 in the stable channel)
found a regression while testing 78.0.3904.70 from the stage PPA: the widevine CDM lib installed by google chrome changed location, a patch needed updating; rebuilt, validated and handed over to the security team for publication
updated dev then beta to 79.0.3945.16 (there were widevine changes that required reworking some patches)
Add systemd socket activation in the daemon/client split. We still have the refresh and initial load to handle.
Enable to have idling timeout in the daemon (which will gracefully stops if no more commands are requested since last idling and will reload on demand).
Simplify even more what’s needed for each command and API implementation (most of the code is autogenerated)
Add a complete command for on demand bash completion. This completion is based on the work (see last week) on cobra to have advanced shell completion (hidden commands completed once specified, help completion and in context completion) for both daemon and client.
Handle man page, bash completion and README generation … The zsys README page is now automatically updated and less sad
Add a fix to skip autopkgtests on non installable architecture.
Fixing CI by switching to master go-cmp (Golang 1.14 reflection restriction)
Reviewed and started to classify 20.04 possible target work (see board). To be confirmed after manager’s Vancouver product sprint.
Reviewed and tested jibel’s installer branch for 20.04 installer design (dedicated advanced feature panel)
helped @marcustomlinson and @kenvandine debug and test cairo v1.17 as part of the gnome-3-34-10-4-sdk on gnome-clocks. determined that need to continue to use v1.16. chased after an evince crash that turned out to be a red herring.
added 2 tests to the gnome-3-34 extension. one test runs just fine but still working on the other one (tests/spread/extensions/gnome-3-34/).
autopkgtest: more bugs fixed (found a systemd bug! but fixed in newer versions and only in quite specific situations, and the fix is a big refactoring, so not trying to get it backported to bionic; worked around on my side), now to try a re-deploy & then give the other admins a tour
discussed, reviewed, worked on a little bit & sponsored some glib2.0s for gunnar
checked outstanding merges (main), mostly punted them but did one or two
new pango1.0 uploaded to experimental, need to sync tomorrow
checked out a hang on the focal daily ISOs which is caused by a commit on the stable branch. that was queued up for SRU to eoan too, so I asked for that to be rejected for now; will re-submit once @3v1n0’s fix is merged.
cups-filters: Investigated the fact that the pdftops (PDF-to-PostScript) is not able to convert colored input into grayscale (to print grayscale on a color printer). See upstream issue #169. Only solution seems to be using Ghostscript or MuPDF or, if one insists on Poppler, rasterizing the input.
CUPS: Synced 2.3.0 from Debian to focal, got stuck in -proposed. When I saw that it is due to a warning about deprecation of printer drivers (filter + PPD) on stderr issued by the lpadmin command, making the autopkg tests fail, @vorlon had already fixed the offending autopkg test (in the cpdb-libs package).
Google Code-In 2019: Unfortunately, the Linux Foundation did not get selected as mentoring organization for this year.
jdstrand reported some problems with the policy module on xenial, which I am trying to reproduce. Once that is sorted out, I think the two backports should be ready to upload.
snapd fwupd interface:
PR #7454 has been merged, which adds an implicit system:fwupd slot usable on classic systems. Use of the interface in published snaps requires a store assertion, as with the snap packaged fwupd (uefi-fw-tools).
It should be available on the edge channel of core now.
snapd session agent systemd control API:
PR #7238 received additional review, and now is just waiting on a final security review.
Once this one and the client library (PR #7456) are merged, I should be able to update the user daemons PR to a state where it can be accepted. And once that’s out of the way, dbus activation should be unblocked.
Better snap support in xdg-desktop-portal:
In the initial version of my PR, I exposed a new snap internal portal-info sub-command. There was some concern about whether snap internal was a good name to expose such commands under. After some discussion, it was decided to use snap routine instead. PR #7589 now implements that suggestion. I need to chase up one more review to get this merged.
PR #7588 needs an update to match the snap routine PR, and to be reviewed.
Gnome Shell:
Chasing down 
Other:
Release bugs:
libreoffice
snaps
firefox
thunderbird
chromium
