Desktop Team Updates - Monday 7th February 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 31st January 2022

1 Like
2 Likes
  • ADSys
    • Finished the development of “Script Support”,
    • and added more unit and integration tests: 1000+ tests in the testsuite.
    • Manual testing.
    • Packaging on focal and release to Jammy.
1 Like

Triple buffering

  • Finally fixed the atomic KMS (Wayland) multi-monitor problem. It’s a pre-existing bug in mutter.
  • Redesigned frame scheduling to resolve a year-long debate about dynamic scaling.
  • Fixed a resource leak on shutdown.
  • Fixed warnings emitted during monitor power saving modes.
  • Retested: Intel, DisplayLink, Raspberry Pi, amdgpu, nouveau, nvidia-470 (EGLStreams), nvidia-510 (GBM), LLVMpipe, Wayland, X11, multi-monitors, power saving modes.
  • I see performance improvement with every driver but major improvements (doubling frame rates) on Intel GPUs and Raspberry Pi. AMD and Nvidia users may still see similar benefits wherever they are unable to maintain full frame rate at present.
  • Feature complete.

Everything else

5 Likes

Desktop Installer

Short week due to being off Thu-Fri.

3 Likes

WSL:

  • Started coding the integration between launcher and the splash application.
  • Reviewed some Ubuntu Desktop Installer PR’s related to WSL integation tests.
  • Drafted a tutorial on Enabling GPU acceleration on Ubuntu on WSL 2.
  • Manual end-to-end tests with the latest image of focal prior to the release of 20.04.4 to ensure none of the changes in the launcher targetting Jammy would cause issues with previous releases.
  • Debugged the CI build workflow causing failure to package 20.04.
1 Like
  • ADSys
    • Finished the development of “Script Support”,
    • and added more unit and integration tests: 1000+ tests in the testsuite.
    • Manual testing.
    • Packaging on focal and release to Jammy.
2 Likes
  • set up xdg-desktop-portal-gnome for translations
  • helped a bit the OEM team with fwupd 1.7 SRU updates
  • fixed the enchant-2 i386 build
  • proposed a change to lp-build-snap to allow specifying the launchpad credentials file to use
  • updated deja-dup to the current stable version
  • experimented on a new service to help reviewing desktop candidate snaps that need promotion to stable. It’s a git workflow that review new candidate revisions for desktop snaps, generate a report of what changed in the snap and open a github issue with the details to review.
  • spent some time figuring out how to generate a launchpad credential for an application to be use in a CI job, reported a launchpadlib bug on the way, thanks Colin for suggesting a workaround!
  • bisected a kernel regression leading to a test laptop not starting anymore
3 Likes
  • poppler February 2022 update and transition. This is the version we’ll be shipping for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Lots of packaging cleanup. Filed a bug with openboard since it now fails to build.

  • Almost finished the libwebp transition. Filed bugs for the remaining issues.

  • Did the gstreamer merges for the first time. Liked it so much, did it twice. 22.04 LTS will get gstreamer 1.20.

  • Merged network-manager 1.34. Will fix autopkgtest and get 1.36 RC packaged next.

  • Did about 100 uploads directly to Jammy this week. A lot of it was rebuilds for those and other smaller transitions.

  • Did initial packaging of the new gtk4 enabled build of gnome-desktop. The build is complex so I’m going to take some more time before uploading to the NEW queues.

  • Uploaded Marco’s mozjs91 packaging to Debian NEW.

  • Completed annual corporate training.

  • Went to virtual FOSDEM for the Ubuntu derivatives and GNOME Beers segments.

Other happenings

  • Simon has uploaded a new polkit build to Debian/experimental/NEW. Debian and Ubuntu plan to update polkit to the latest release (instead of the old fork before the JavaScript rules change) for their next stable releases after Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
3 Likes
  • LAS - website updates, worked with @bwyazel to get out the cfp
  • gh snaps:
    • gnome-dictionary: worked lightly on wip pr. The state is that even with a pin’d version of meson (or master) we still hit a redundant declaration build failure. Also created github mirror in LP and pointed the LP snap builds at it.
    • gnome-font-viewer: Created github mirror in LP and pointed the LP snap builds at it. Updated it to core18/gnome-3-38 and debugging in local builds. (needed a pin’d meson version, will continue debugging efforts to finish updating)
  • Interviews
  • Looked at ubuntu telemetry connection… wrote some python to do the connection and querying (private repo)
  • Lined up Indaba for end of Feb - topic will be LAS (and probably some Akademy and GUADEC updates) with Aleix and Kristi.
2 Likes

firefox24 firefox

  • filed a bug against the kubuntu desktop seed to request pulling in xdg-desktop-portal-gtk by default for better integration with desktop snaps, including firefox
  • preparing 97.0 builds, scheduled for release tomorrow

thunderbird24 thunderbird

  • uploaded 91.6.0 to jammy, and preparing updates for bionic, focal and impish

chromium22 chromium

  • updated beta then stable to 98.0.4758.80
  • updated dev then beta to 99.0.4844.17
  • updating dev to 100.0.4867.0
  • fixed the default ANGLE renderer not working in the snap because of missing libs

flutter24 Ubuntu Desktop Installer

1 Like
  • CUPS Snap: The pull request for adding the cups printing interface got finally merged!! Thanks to @alexmurray for the quick security review! Discussed the further steps needed for the integration with @ijohnson and opened a new discussion thread in the snapcraft forum, with a summary of what we have a TODO list and instructions for trying it out.
  • cups-filters: As the first release candidate of cups-filters 2.x will not be ready for the Feature Freeze of Jammy Jellyfish backported several fixes to the 1.x branch, especially the fixes on the page geometry with all combinations of print-scaling and number-up settings, also with asymmetric margins and documents with varying page sizes. Tested also printing via cups-browsed with raster-only destination printers and it works. Discovered and corrected some bugs during that and fixed them in both 1.x and 2.x. Continued testing and bug-fixing to approach the 2.x release. Especially found some fixes when testing cups-browsed under 1.x. Also continued mentoring GSoC code contributor candidates and merged a PR for changing the default resolution for images.
  • HPLIP Printer Application: The reporter of Issue #2 on the problem that the firmware file does not get loaded into his HP LaserJet P1005 when it is turned on found a solution! Thanks a lot to him for solving a problem where I was not able to test on.
  • All Snaps: Updated the included QPDF to version 10.5.0, updated the GhostScript and the PostScript Printer Applications to use HPLIP 3.21.12, and let the PostScript Printer Application also use the Debian package source instead of the upstream source of HPLIP (to make use of the ~80 bug fix patches). Also added a workaround for a bug in the PAPPL GIT snapshot, which the Printer Application Snaps are currently using.
  • GUI tools and the New Architecture of printing: Made a write-up of what we have and what has to be done on an internal site of Canonical, will include a copy of this in the February news post which I will do later this week.
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: Contributor candidates continue to get CUPS and cups-filters GitHub issues as assignments and are working on them, mainly under my mentorship. Mentoring organization application period starts this week.
  • Bugs.
1 Like