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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On Sun, Sep 11 I will depart for the Linux Plumbers conference 2022 and the Open Source Summit 2022 in Dublin, Ireland.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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Printer Applications under WSL: Planned with @cnihelton the next stage of the HOWTO for the next version of WSL.
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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 ).
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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.
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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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