Desktop Team Updates - Monday 7th March 2022

Desktop Team Updates
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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 28th February 2022

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Working with Desktop Icons NG upstream to fix cosmetic issues

Triple buffering

Everything else

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Installer

  • Let subiquity decide the initial timezone to respect previously applied timezone
  • Added support for more environment variables in subiquity_client to give full control over subiquity
  • Implemented a proxy asset bundle that fixes asset loading for flavors
  • Reorganized and renamed image assets to be more flavor-friendly and agnostic
  • Adjusted package dependencies to be more flavor-friendly
  • Experimented with a tool that manages subiquity client/instance/submodule mainly targeting flavors for which the subiquity submodule is “hidden” in Pub cache

Other

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  • Attended the Engineering Sprint in Frankfurt
  • CUPS Snap: The auto-connect permissions for the cups interface are in place now, thanks to @alexmurray and @emitorino. Meeting with @mvo and @ijohnson in Frankfurt to plan the remaining steps. To make the new cups interface usable for application snappers we need first to add the /var/snap directories to the base Snaps (@ijohnson, in the next few days), release snapd 2.55.0 (@mvo/@ijohnson, in 2-4 weeks), and add cups-socket-directory: $SNAP_COMMON/run and assumes: [snapd2.55] to snapcraft.yaml of the CUPS Snap (me, right after snapd 2.55.0 release). With this done we will announce the interface for snappers to use. Later on, @mvo will do the integration of the default-provider: cups in the cups interface, so that no extra content interface needs to be defined in the client application Snaps.
  • cups-filters: On the way to cups-filters 2.x added monochrome PCLm output support to the ghostscript() filter function (commit, commit), added PCLm output support to the gstoraster filter function wrapper (commit), and added MiME rules for PCLm (commit). This was motivated by the discovery of a driverless printer which supports only PCLm, the HP LaserJet M15.
  • Ghostscript: Reported crash when generating PCLm with SGray ICC profile and posted feature request for a grayscale PCLm mode.
  • CUPS: Helped Sergio Cazzolato to find a fix for a CUPS bug when testing the cups interface of snapd on Debian unstable. It turned out to be Debian bug #1006853.
  • Printer Setup Tool for New Architecture: In Frankfurt talked with @elioqoshi and with @kenvandine about the development of the printer setup tool (GNOME Control Center module) and its upstreamization. The requirements and status (public copy) are posted on Jira and will be forwarded to the design team for the UI design. then this design hat be put over the already existing code for the first two parts done in the last two GSoCs and the third part is posted as project in this year’s GSoC.
  • Linux Application Summit 2022: In Franfurt talked with @hellsworth about the conference and she suggested me to participate. Drafted a proposal for a 40-minute in-person talk to tell application developers about the changes in printing and what is needed to change in applications. Sent the proposal to @hellsworth to check whether it is all OK. The conference will take place on April 29-30 in Rovereto, Italy.
  • OpenPrinting/PWG Annual Meeting (OpenPrinting Summit): The meeting will take place as a virtual meeting on May 17-20.
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: The Linux Foundation got accepted as mentoring organization, and as part of it also OpenPrinting! Started to invite the mentors. Added another project idea: Native Gutenprint Printer Application and Gutenprint maintainer Robert Krawitz considers this an important project. Contributor candidates continue to get CUPS and cups-filters GitHub issues as assignments and are working on them, mainly under my mentorship.
  • Bugs.
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Attended the Engineering Sprint last week.

WSL:

  • Updated the splash application to handle programmatic requests for hiding the window.
  • Drafted the launcher side of the proof-of-concept for enabling systemd
  • Pushed a PR to enable the launcher to react on user closing the splash window.
  • Investigating other small enhancements for the installer UX (likely having more control of window positioning, enforcing the OOBE GUI to start hidden).
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:airplane: GNOME Console 42 Beta is now available for install in Debian Unstable & Ubuntu Jammy. (This is GNOME 42’s new recommended terminal; it was previously known as kgx or Kings Cross.)

:airplane: Removed gnome-screenshot from the default install since GNOME Shell 42 provides this feature now. This was a bit premature since GNOME Shell 42 is still only in jammy-proposed while we figure out how to handle a few issues with the transition.

:airplane: Began backporting the .desktop (etc.) rename of gnome-control-center to Jammy. Seemed easier to go forward than backward here.

:airplane: Filed a Feature Freeze Exception to get evince 42 in to Jammy.

:airplane: Started working with Heather on packaging some new GNOME-related things in Debian.

:airplane: Backported some bluez patches to fix some bluetooth audio crashes & reconnect issues in Jammy

:airplane: Helped on a proposed gstreamer SRU for 20.04 LTS

:airplane: Discussed with some Foundations people getting a Desktop Team member on the Ubuntu Release Team. This will be discussed further.

:airplane: Participated in various Desktop, Community, and “+1 Maintenance” discussions

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firefox24 firefox

chromium22 chromium

  • updated beta then stable to 99.0.4844.51
  • updated dev then beta to 100.0.4896.20
  • updated dev to 101.0.4919.0
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  • joined a Canonical engineering sprint in Frankfurt
  • sponsored some unity logo version updates
  • fixed gedit failing to build on s390x
  • helped with the gstreamer stable update for focal
  • sponsored a SRU for the oem team
  • created a MIR for libqrtr-glib needed to handle qualcom modems
  • investigated a build issue on the canary ISO
  • upload to pipewire-media-session change from Daniel to not set pulseaudio and jack by default since we still use pulseaudio as a sound server. It should fix the sounds settings not being correctly restored on login. Those who want to use re-enable the feature should create an empty file /etc//pipewire/media-session.d/with-pulseaudio (and with-jack)
  • updated pipewire to the current stable version by merging from Debian
  • sponsored TLP changes from OEM to remove the conflict with power-profiles-daemon, now it will not try to change the performance profile if the GNOME service is active
  • updated the thunderbird stable snap to 91.6.2
  • cherry picked changes for OWE wifi settings issues
  • removed gnome shell extensions which needs to be update for the GNOME serie since those are one of the blockers for proposed migration
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