Desktop Team Updates – Monday 6th February 2023

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 30th January 2023

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  • Lots of bug triage and user support in Launchpad and upstreams. Backlog stats are here.
  • Triple buffering for GNOME 44:
    • !2087: Minor changes to secondary GPU buffer management to resolve reviews, which also required retesting with multi-GPU setups and fixing conflicts downstream. Merged upstream!
    • !1968: More detailed discussion about redesigning unified buffer management again.
    • !1441: Fixed the cursor CPU performance issue and improved downclocking to double buffering (lower latency) with a single change. If no issues are found then this will be worth backporting to jammy and kinetic later.
  • Retested multiple configurations of NVIDIA-525 because Oliver had some worrying comments about performance. No issues found.
  • Conflict fixes for DisplayLink and deep colour backburners.
  • Desktop Icons NG: Fixed failure to load in GNOME 44.
  • Internal: Kivu project planning, travel planning
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Installer

Snap Store

Workshops

Yaru

Flutter

  • Investigated and bisected a build issue on Linux arm64
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Software store

packagekit.dart

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firefox24 firefox

package24 misc

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Steam Snap

Gaming Graphics

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  • New Desktop Installer
    • fixed the memtest menu entry
    • removed the non working oem mode entry
    • updated the systemd unit to show the try/install page again
    • worked on fixing the daily ISO tests
    • reviewed the proposed change for how subiquity_client is integrated to the vcs
  • Attended FOSDEM
  • Reviewed and sponsored software-properties/Ubuntu Pro fixes and improvements from Nathan
  • Participated to the Canonical mid-cycle roadmap review virtual event
  • Canonical HR training
  • Another round of thunderbird updates, 102.7.1 is published on the different series now.
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  • Worked with Amin on +1 Maintenance. See our notes for more details.
  • Nautilus 44 Alpha has reached Ubuntu 23.04 now that the big python3 transition has finished.
  • Cherrypicked a fix for Debian and Ubuntu 23.04 to let blueprint-compiler work with Python 3.11 since that’s our default Python now.
  • Filed a bug (fixed now) for dh-python’s X-Python3-Version to correctly handle Python 3.10 and later releases.
  • Sponsored a packaging update for harfbuzz to include the subset library. The main blocker here was a full copyright audit and update of debian/copyright.
  • xdg-terminal-exec has made it into Debian Experimental and Ubuntu 23.04. More integration work is needed for this to actually be useful.
  • gnome-text-editor is now back in sync between Debian and Ubuntu since we got approval to use the distro editorconfig-core library.
  • The Unicode 15 update of our color emoji font is being rolled out to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS now.
  • Attended one of the Ubuntu desktop flavor lead meeting sessions. I have an action item to formally propose moving pipewire to our desktop-common seed so that it’s used by all Ubuntu desktop flavors.
  • Found out the hard way that glib 2.75.2 breaks audio. Fortunately, that version is only in Debian Experimental and not in Ubuntu at all yet.

Other news

  • corectrl’s dependencies are now in Debian and Ubuntu. The only blocker now is a build failure. Unfortunately, this means that corectrl won’t make it into Debian 12 because it will be too late for the new package deadline next week.
  • The seahorse-nautilus extension is back in Debian and Ubuntu 23.04. (It is not available in Ubuntu 22.10 because nautilus switched to gtk4 which required extensions to adapt.)
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Back in Vienna (UTC +01)

  • cups: Added separate polling of the media-col-database IPP attribute from a driverless printer if polling all and media-col-database together with one get-printer-attributes request fails (PR). Without this in some cases printer features, like borderless printing, get overlooked (Issue on cups-filters). Also upstreamized the patch for supporting the new snapd-glib-2 API (commit), and fixed a bug in the Debian package of CUPS. making gnutls not be used and so hash methods be missing (2.4.2-1ubuntu4).
  • cups-filters: Released the third beta of all the 4 new packages with the fixes accumulated after the second beta. Many fixes are in the build system and the source code documentation, but there were also things like monochrome PXL-XL not working due to wrong color profile, separate poll of media-col-database attribute from driverless printers, parsing media-col-ready in the get-printer-attributes IPP response, remove unnecessary and not-working cfPDFOut...() API. Afterwards Zdenek Dohnal removed more overlooked, unnecessary dependencies, the C++ dependencies in cups-filters and cups-browsed, and he also added explanations for the actually needed dependencies. In addition, a GSoC contributor candidate is migrating the cupstestppd utility from CUPS into libppd (PR).
  • PAPPL: Debian’s package got updated to version 1.3.1 and synced into Ubuntu, allowing for packaging pappl-retrofit now.
  • pappl-retrofit: Released second beta upstream and created first Debian/Ubuntu package, including a binary package of the Legacy Printer Application for making classically installed (also proprietary) printer drivers available for the CUPS Snap and for CUPS 3.x.
  • Braille Printer Application: Continued working with Chandresh Soni on the PR for getting the Braille Printer Application upstream. Told Zdenek Dohnal that we have to go with the classic CUPS driver for now until the merge takes place.
  • OpenPrinting: Kurt Pfeifle, who made me know about CUPS back in mid-2000 by a magazine article and so made me what I am now has retired and now wants to contribute to documentation on OpenPrinting!
  • Google Summer of Code 2023: Continued assigning GitHub issues and other work items to contributor candidates and mentored them on working on the issues. Partially I am also already introducing candidates into possible projects. Also guiding mentors of other (non-OpenPrinting) workgroups of the Linux Foundation to post their project ideas.
  • Bugs.
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