Desktop Team Updates - Monday 5th September 2022

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 29th August 2022

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  • Tried to recover a bit after the rush to get GNOME 43 Beta into Ubuntu 22.10 before Feature Freeze
  • Helped the new proposed Ubuntu Unity official flavor by pushing some updates of their metapackage.
  • Updated the cairomm packaging and packaged a new source package for cairomm1.16 which is required to package gtkmm 4 (the C++ bindings for GTK 4)
  • Pushed more of the nautilus-python extension porting to Debian. There are still 4 more Nautilus extensions that I want fixed before I push Nautilus 43 to Unstable. Waiting on the maintainers now; may need to do non-maintainer uploads soon if the maintainers don’t respond.
  • Ported Tilix’s built-in Nautilus extension to minimally work with Nautilus 43
  • Completed the big evolution-data-server & related GNOME 43 libraries transition in Ubuntu.
  • Finished the prep work to do that transition in Debian. I expect it will happen next week.
  • Briefly helped test the Ubuntu 20.04.5 desktop ISO before its release yesterday.

Other News

  • Simon has filed bugs for all the packaged GNOME Shell extensions in Debian that need to be adapted for GNOME Shell 43. Debian has a much longer list because Ubuntu intentionally removed most extensions to allow for smoother and faster Ubuntu stable release updates. We will likely push GNOME Shell 43 to Debian Unstable after the evolution-data-server transition is completed. Extensions that aren’t ready will be removed from Testing, as we’ve done for previous major GNOME Shell releases.
  • GNOME 43 RC is scheduled for release next week
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Desktop Installer

WSL OOBE

Workshops

(On vacation Tue-Fri.)

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firefox24 firefox

  • preparing 104.0.2 update
  • native messaging patch
    • filed a bug to get test dependencies added to Mozilla’s CI infrastructure
    • applied for level 1 commit access, which allows me to request test runs in Mozilla’s CI
  • merged Alexandre’s hunspell branch into nightly, now sorting out store assertions and auto-connections before it can be cherry-picked into the beta branch

chromium22 chromium

  • updated stable to 105.0.5195.52
  • finished writing notes on chromium in Ubuntu maintenance (internal for now, to be published on wiki.ubuntu.com)
  • handed over maintenance of chromium (snap, deb, and the chromium-ffmpeg snap) to Nathan

flutter24 Ubuntu Store

  • submitted various small fixes
    • #123: SnapDialog: timestamps are not localized
    • #125: SnapDialog: add tooltips for the timestamps fields
    • #135: SnapDialog: use localized timestamps for the tooltips
    • #168: Add copyright headers and contributing guidelines
    • #187: Wire up clicking hyperlinks in the about dialog
    • #190: Pin flutter at 3.0.5 to workaround rendering issues with 3.3
  • packaged as a snap (#163)

package24 other

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  • debugged gvfs autopkgtests failing with the new glib, reported an upstream bug with details about the issue
  • reverted the labelling of themes as legacy in gnome-tweaks for the LTS since we don’t use libadwaita there yet
  • SRUed a speech fix to get voices correctly listed, which is part of the fix to get the feature working again in firefox
  • reviewed changes to use inclusive naming in software-properties
  • proposed a gnome-3-38-2004 change to include a default set of fonts configuration in the sdk, should fix pdf rendering issues in firefox by making correct use of the UWR fonts
  • investigated more issues with glib 2.73 and regexp after noticing than gedit failed to enable python3 syntax hilighting with the new version
  • updated the gtksourceview packages to include installed-tests and used the new binary to set up autopkgtests
  • tried to validate the tests in a ppa but hit a launchpad bug where proposed was always enabled on arm64 even if the ppa was set to build without proposed
  • investigated a bit kinetic livefs build failures
  • helped with the pipewiresrc SRU by providing some details and extra testcases requested during the SRU team review
  • reviewed the TB draft for a ‘Third party repository requirements’ policy and provided some desktop feedback
  • promoted the thunderbird 102.2.1 snap to stable
  • did a new snapshot of modemmanager including fixes for glib 2.73
  • started working on also adding autopkgtests to gtksourceview5 but hit an upstream bug, invistigated and reported it upstream
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On Sun, Sep 11 I will depart for the Linux Plumbers conference 2022 and the Open Source Summit 2022 in Dublin, Ireland.

  • snapd: In snapped applications seeded for the initial installation of the OS, unfortunately, the default-provider: cups which is in the snapcraft.yaml for auto-installing the CUPS Snap as dependency for the cups printing interface, breaks the installation, even if the CUPS Snap is also seeded. A bug got reported and now we are waiting for @jamesh and @pedronis to fix this. The full integration of the dependency in the cups interface (not needing default-provider: cups) as promised by @mvo in Frankfurt in March is postponed for next cycle.
  • cups-filters: Completed the coding, bug fixing, and testing for the cups-filters 2.0b1 release and switched over to cleaning up the coding style! We are getting close. Release will probably be shortly after me coming back from Dublin. Fixed selection of PDF renderer in the build system (commit), added support for Poppler’s pdftops to the cfFilterUniversal() filter function/universal CUPS filter (commit), in cfFilterPDFToRaster() fixed margins of output pages (commit), cfFilterRasterToPDF() only accepts PWG Raster, not CUPS Raster, so renamed it to cfFilterPWGToPDF() (commit) and only feed PWG Raster into it (commit), and finally removed the not-used-by-anyone PHP and Perl APIs (commit) and legacy image format support (commit). That’s it! Started cleaning up the coding style mix-up of more than a decade of contributions.
  • CUPS: Michael Sweet started to create the GitHub repositories for CUPS 3.x on the OpenPrinting GitHub: libcups, cups-commands, cups-local, cups-sharing (What’s that?!). I gave him the needed admin rights on OpenPrinting, also for automated CI and such. CUPS 2.5.x will be delayed somewhat, to land in 23.10 instead of 23.04, but this will not delay the switchover to the New Architecture based on the cUPS Snap as default printing environment in 23.04. The delay is due to the fact that Michael did not start the coding for 2.5.x yet. CUPS 3.x will not get delayed, it is still scheduled to land in 24.04 LTS.
  • Common Print Dialog Backends: Accepted PRs from GSoC contributor Gaurav Guleria in both cpdb-libs and cpdb-backend-cups to support multiple margin variants per media size (like standard and borderless).
  • pappl-retrofit, Ghostscript Printer Application: Adapted the printer driver retro-fit library and the Ghostscript Printer Application to the last and final changes of the cups-filters 2.x API and also fixed a crasher in pappl-retrofit (commit, commit). I also no-change-rebuilt all the Printer Application Snaps to catch the newest changes and fixes in cups-filters 2.x and pappl-retrofit.
  • system-config-printer: Zdenek Dohnal has released version 1.5.18 with several bug fix PRs merged. I will update to this version in Ubuntu 22.10.
  • Printer Applications under WSL: Planned with @cnihelton the next stage of the HOWTO for the next version of WSL.
  • Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin: The conference is coming closer! Doing the last preparative steps. Especially Valentin Viennot, Product Manager ROCKs & Container Images of Canonical, will participate in the session about Containerization of CUPS and Printer Applications. He originally was only for the Open Source Summit in Dublin, but I got special permission from the organizers of Plumbers that he can join the OpenPrinting MC on Plumbers. I (and also @madhens) participated in a training session for Big Blue Button (the system for hybrid conferencing) in preparation of the MC and also worked out the proceeding during the MC with @madhens who will do the communication with the remote participants while I concentrate on the audience in the room. Also got slides from Michael Sweet for 3 of the sessions in the MC. Also created a Telegram group for the easy communication in Dublin “Dubliners: Canonical, OpenPrinting, and friends” (Not really a Canonical Gang this time :frowning: ).
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: The standard deadline for the contributors to finish their projects and submit their final reports is Sep 12, the coming Monday. As the contributors had college exams and re-start of the classes already, they could not continue full-time on their projects in the last weeks. Therefore I have extended the deadlines by 4-6 weeks for all the 7 contributors. Better to have thoroughly completed projects then unfinished or rushed-in ones. Especially nothing of this year’s GSoC work is planned to make it into Ubuntu 22.10. And for the GNOME Control Center sub-team there is time to work out the UI with GNOME’s designers now, too.
  • OpenPrinting: Monthly video meeting failed due to technical problems, never again WebEx! But nevertheless I will do a September News Post, but only after Dublin (in 2 weeks from now), to include the outcome of the conferences.
  • Bugs.
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Azure Active Directory

  • Implement the C library which calls the new CLI
  • Multiple reviews on tests for the CLIs

Misc:

  • MIR reviews *-perl (reverse dependencies of lintian)
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Gaming:

  • Tested some games with the steam snap. Native games run well, Proton games fail to start. Collected some logs and shared them with the team.

Snaps:

  • Tested most of the core22 snaps, which most of them were working well. Reported the issues seen.
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Azure Active Directory

  • finish CLI implementation
  • adapt debian packaging to work with new C NSS library
  • assist in adapting integration tests to work with the new C NSS library
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Steam Snap

  • Added Snap support to Gamemode (for portal support)
  • Worked on adding Snap support to xdg-desktop-portals
  • Created test snap
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WSL

  • Fixed a bug in Subiquity API tests causing random failures due existing state in .subiquity directory. Subiquity #1405
  • Merged the previously submitted pull request that added the flag for skipping installation of language packs in the Flutter GUI.
  • Investigated (and still doing) potential user experience issues with snaps in Ubuntu WSL due lack of explicit or implicit dependencies.
  • Continued investigation around implementing the WSL end-to-end tests.

UDI

  • Reviewed some pull requests. #1105 and #1099.
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Azure Active Directory

  • Implemented the new NSS executable which is called by the C library to handle the database queries;
  • Adapted the integration tests to work with the new C lib + NSS executable paradigm.
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