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.
PostScript Printer Application: Started developing a Printer Application to support all PostScript printers, especially the ones for which we have manufacturer-supplied PPD files. It will be the first Printer Application using the new resources of cups-filters 2.x: libppd (both handling of PPDs themselves and of PPD collections), filter functions (pstops(), pdftops(), imagetops(), rastertops()). Studied libpappl to find out how to develop the first non-raster Printer Application. First step is to get a working model, with PAPPL as it is now, later on there will probably posted feature requests on PAPPL. The Printer Application is supposed to be part of the cups-filters project, where also a Foomatic Printer Application will be added later.
cups-filters: Completed the PPD collection support in libppd, at least to be able to start working on Printer Applications which retro-fit classic CUPS drivers. There will be still some fine-tuning though. especially on selecting the correct PPD for a discovered printer.
cups-filters: Improved the performance of the driverless utility by making it cause only 1 call of ippfind instead of 4 when CUPS is looking for available printers or PPDs. Found out that this is possible by studying the source code of ippfind. Also studies possible ways of further performance improvement when using libavahi directly instead of calling ippfind. I will release cups-filters 1.28.4 soon to get the improvements into Groovy.
ipp-usb, sane-airscan: Still waiting for the security team to verify the MIRs for ipp-usb and sane-airscan.
Linux Foundation Mentorship Program: Mentoring the two IPP Scan students (Client, Server).
Google Season of Docs 2020: Mentoring our technical writer, doing corrections. He is also contributing to the OpenPrinting web sites with ideas and fixes.
debugged ubuntu-wallpapers ftbfs, turned out to be due to a debhelper change, reported to Debian
sponsoring, librsvg, vala, ibus
desktop updates, gcr, gupnp-igd, gnome-bluetooth
snaps: fixed the eog build (disabling libportal since that’s available in G only)
tested some GNOME snaps updates in candidate to promote to stable
debugged clocks’ snap failing to play sound
spent some time trying to find a decent tomboy remplacement for notes, experimenting with gnome-todo for now (but considering a todo.txt based solution otherwise)
Uploaded the new wallpapers, helped to pick the alternative ones.
Looked after the usual weekly autopkgtest cloud breakage (this time half the ppc64el capacity is down).
We went into beta freeze, so I’ve been spending some time reviewing uploads to the Groovy queue and finding a few bugs.
Kept on investigating a problem with partition resizing for the raspberry pi images. Eventually I found the bug, and smoser kindly fixed it, then @paride uploaded to the archive. Thanks
I received a review of snapd PR #9268 (theme installation API), and have updated the branch accordingly.
The access control PRs that would provide the basis for making this available without snapd-control access is still needs security review.
snapctl is-connected changes:
I’ve updated snapd PR #9132 to support an --apparmor-label argument too, which should allow race free connection checks based on aa_getpeercon.
Miscelaneous snapd changes:
snapd PR #9370 was merged: a simple refactor of the way snap userd registers bus names, so people aren’t tempted to add even more bus names to the daemon when adding new interfaces. This was to support Alan’s desktop-launch interface.
snapd PR #9448 was merged, adding ObjectManager access to the network-manager interface’s permanent slot rules. This allows unconfined clients to communicate with a snapped NetworkManager using modern client libraries. This problem was discovered while integrating the snap into the experimental Ubuntu Core GDM image.
snapd PR #9464 was merged, adjusting the the Github Actions workflow to deal with a coming change to how environment variables are handled.
Gnome Shell and friends:
Audio:
Bug tracking:
firefox
chromium
other