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.
Updated dbus.dart, desktop_notifications.dart, nm.dart, upower.dart and udisks.dart to use Dart 1.12 final now it’s released, adding null safety support where required.
Worked on showing ESM status in software-properties.
CUPS/CUPS Snap: Committed all patches on CUPS to work in a Snap into CUPS upstream. Now the CUPS Snap has only 2 patches left on CUPS, which do not have to with the fact that we run CUPS in a Snap. With CUPS 2.4.0 which will get released soon, the CUPS Snap will most probably not need patches at all on CUPS. Also applied @jamesh’s new snapctl-via library-function so that CUPS does not need to do an external executable call for each administrative inquiry to be verified. General improvements and fixes: “usb” CUPS backend to run as root (also upstream issue), paths and plugs of the “apps” entries, QPDF 10.3.0. Still waiting for the interface auto-connection activation, all votes are in: @alexmurray, @popey, @kyrofa, thanks for your votes!
sane-airscan: Still waiting for the MIR to get reviewed by the security team. Feature Freeze for Hirsute has passed, and I had posted the MIR in time for Groovy already.
We had a package fail to promote from hirsute-proposed to hirsute. We only found out once the bug it caused started to be noticed by users. That’s bad, and to stop this happening in future I worked with IS to create a (private) mailing list that the copying process sends emails to. The bot now uses that list.
Bit more fiddling behind the scenes with the new proposed-migration cloud environment. I’m going to start a test deployment this week (it’ll mostly not be visible though).
What I still need to test is that the webhook (GitHub) submissions still work properly.
Some applicant reviews for our open position. There’s still time to apply if you have Flutter experience and want to help improve it on Ubuntu.
re-enabled unity-menubar.patch for the 87 branch (beta), which was much more involved than the usual minor changes
confirmed a startup crash that is an upstream regression, I am considering cherry-picking the upstream fix but I’m waiting to see if we get more reports from Ubuntu users first
chromium
updated stable to 89.0.4389.82 (snap and deb), and handed over to the security team for sponsoring to {xenial,bionic}-security
Unsurprisingly, a number of users have reported a regression when upgrading to 89 because these builds do not embed the OAuth ID for the sync API that is going to be disabled on March 15 by Google, which results in synced profile data being erased from the local profile. From a user perspective this is very unfriendly but as it’s an upstream decision there’s not much packagers can do about it, so I commented on the bug report to explain as clearly as possible the situation, and marked “Won’t Fix” (but this should be “Can’t Fix”, really).
Continued poking at failing autopkgtests on bionic (starting with 89), but I’m still unable to reproduce the failures, despite trying various test environments. I am not admitting defeat just yet.
libreoffice
sponsored another 7.1.1 RC2 upload to hirsute for Rico
after a lot of red herrings, released 7.1.1.2 with working icons… getting this snap released was where most of my time went.
Also discovered a bug where yaru icons aren’t working in hirsute (but work fine on focal).
rebased my uc20/gnome-3-38 updates branch on working 7.1 changes but still have a runtime icon issue with startcenter.desktop. needs more investigation but would like this to be completed this week. Once the snap finishes building and works (icons and all!), then we can remove a whole heck of a lot of stuff from the LO snap, reducing its size. And then the LO snap will be in more maintenance mode.
VPAT
investigated the vpat issue. here are my (internal) notes. the plan is to update the one contributed to us, but only the pieces listed as being supported. In time we could get to completing every line (87 items) in these tables. This should be completed this week.
Took some time off, finally some skiing was possible
GNOME
Fixed gjs issue to handle undefined → 0 conversion for types which need to use a bigger wrapper container, causing test failures in various architectures [MR]
Some more gdm smartcard tests and fixes
Improved loading of host fingerprints data in fprintd [MR]
Made some updates to snapd PR #9963 (support dbus activation of “snap userd” on Ubuntu Core) in response to review feedback.
Created snapd PR #9986, adding a polkit policy file validator (or at least as much validation as can be done with Go’s XML package). This is intended as part of a future “polkit” interface to allow snapped daemons to implement polkit authorisation support.
snapd PR #9910 was merged, which adds a user tag to user services in the output of snap services and snapctl services. Unlike system services, the active state is not reported for user services since there isn’t a single unique instance for a user service.
Started work on a PR to make the service control commands function predictably in the presence of user services. Still a bit of work to do before it’s ready for review.
As we’ve cleared the blockers for the dbus-activation feature flag, I had a discussion with Alex from the security team about whether they have any concerns about the feature. He seemed happy with it, so we might be able to get that enabled soon. There is still some work to get user-daemons into shape though.
firefox
chromium
libreoffice
snaps
other