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.
Took initial look at libreoffice help issue and started narrowing down where the problem is
worked on updating glimpse-editor for gnome 3.36 but having issues
worked on updating the libreoffice snap to use the gnome-3-34 extension but having some issue with missing Python.h. Need to run another test but then will reach out for another pair of eyes…
snapd PR #5822 (user session daemon support) is in a good state with all feedback from @pedronis addressed, but hasn’t been merged yet.
snapd PR #6258 (dbus activation) has been rebased on current snapd master, and a feature flag has been added to gate access to the feature. At present it is blocked on getting a new revision of test-snapd-dbus-service approved and published to the store: we can’t easily build the test snap during the spread tests, and the version I’ve tried to publish failed manual review because it uses new snap.yaml syntax. All unit tests are passing though, for what that’s worth.
snapd xdg-desktop-portal support
snapd PR #8289 (portal support in the xdg-open proxy) was merged to master. The original plan was to cherry pick this to the 2.44 branch, but that has not happened: it was deemed too much of a risk for the 2.44.2 release.
snapd PR #8356 (adding a snap routine file-access command for use by the document portal) is still waiting for a review.
I created snapd PR #8413, which has been reviewed and now merged. This change loosens the AppArmor policy slightly to allow the user to open files owned by other users through the document portal. A common use case would be to open documentation owned by root found in /usr/share/doc as a regular user.
miscellaneous snapd work:
While debugging an intermittent test failure in the user-daemons PR, I discovered the problem was in another pre-existing spread test leaving behind a broken user session running on the system. I split the fix for that out into snapd PR #8385, which was merged.
To help with migration of CI over to Github Actions, I put together snapd PR #8429. This ports the CLA check job over from Travis CI. The only real difficulty was that it was using the TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE environment variable, for which there is no equivalent in GH Actions.
Worked on the beta release: testing, doing the cdimage things, reviewing fixes from others, making some fixes, sending the announcement, working with Canonical IS on resolving some problems
More making Ubiquity bend to my will in order to show the right RST UI
Reviewed and uploaded fixes from Marcus to update-manager, uploaded those to the queue
Debugged issues with appstream in snap-store and tracked it down to a snapd issue which has just been fixed in the 2.44 branch and should be released soon
Debugged issues with url handling in snaps
Worked around desktop file issue in snap-store snap to display “Ubuntu Software” properly when run on Ubuntu. @3v1n0 has a proper fix for this in gnome-shell.
cups-filters: To facilitate the planned restructuring for better integration in Printer Applications I started working on cleaning up the license chaos. cups-filters is a unification of many small projects which were done under many different licenses. Now I am changing the license to be Apache 2.0 plus (L)GPL2 exception, the same license as CUPS and PAPPL use. I have asked all contributors whether they agree and most have already agreed within 24 hours.
cups-filters: Further thoughts for the restructuring. Probably will get a 2.x.y version number or get renamed, cups-browsed and perhaps libfontembed separated.
PAPPL: The Printer Application Framework from Michael Sweet is progressing more. Now the emulated IPP printers advertise themselves correctly via DNS-SD and so one gets local CUPS queues with all the usual methods: cups-browsed, driverless utility together with printer setup tool or CUPS web interface, CUPS-internal temporary queues. Response to get-printer-attributes IPP request not yet 100% correct but one can actually print!
Google Summer of Code 2020: No more than the 5 already found students seem to be suitable for OpenPrinting. The other possible candidates either had a bad proposal or do not answer our e-mails. Told to the student who will do the Printer Application Framework that his work will be subject to change, due to strong development work by Michael Sweet on PAPPL. Sorting out student proposal list according to the other sub-orgs of the Linux Foundation, to find out how many slots to request in total from Google.
Gnome Shell:
Plymouth:
Housekeeping:
firefox
thunderbird
chromium
snaps
other