Desktop Team Updates - Monday 9th January 2023

Project Discussion Desktop
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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 year’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates - Monday 19th December 2022

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Desktop Installer

Workshops

Other

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Short week with monday and friday off.

WSL

Windows Subsystem for Linux

  • Wrote a new README! Ubuntu/WSL #336
  • Discovered that reusable Github actions cannot be shared across organizations if they are self-hosted :frowning: , so I’m now figuring out a way for users to run actions on WSL easily. Ubuntu/WSL #337 and GoWSL #10.

GoWSL

A module to interface with WSL via Go

  • Finished Stdout/Stderr redirection mimicking the exec module. GoWSL #7
  • Finished Stdin redirection mimicking the exec module. GoWSL #4
  • Made project prettier (Improved README, documentation, typos, linters) GoWSL #11
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software-store

firmware-updater

  • Updated yaru icons and widgets (#144, #145)
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  • cups-filters: Debian packaging of the new generation separated into components, so that the new packages smoothly replace the old ones on update. Found an old package named “libppd” which was a library providing the PPD support functionality ripped out of libcups to LPD users, via the “gpr” and “ppdfilt” utilities. It stayed unmaintained for more than 20 years. Discussed its removal/renaming with Debian folks and settled on renaming this into “libppd-legacy” after the Debian Bookworm release. Packaged the components Ubuntu-only for now and finding some build system and documentation bugs and also having an API bug discovered during the CPDB work fixed, released the second beta.
  • Common Print Dialog Backends (CPDB): Gaurav Guleria continued his work on the CPDB integration in the print dialogs. Especially he added an option group concept, implemented support for translated UI strings for option, choice, and option group names (commit) and also did a fix on the API of libcupsfilters for that (commit). Gaurav’s best friend and dorm roommate got inspired by Gaurav’s enthusiasm, started volunteering on CPDB and wants to participate in GSoC 2023. I have put him now to study the print dialog of Firefox. I had really motivating and inspiring Telegram 1:1s with him, he is currently studying a semester in Germany and I inspired him to attend FOSDEM. Also posted on Debian Printing mailing list to propose for introduction of the CPDB into Debian.
  • GNOME Control Center “Printers” module: worked with Mohit Verma on preparing his work on the “Add Printer” part for @elioqoshi and Canonical’s UI/UX design team to work on the UI design for the upstream integration. @kenvandine asked me for some screenshots and screencasts and so Mohit has provided them. Mohit is also starting to look into work to be done on the main panel (list of printers/IPP services).
  • PAPPL scanning support: Also found a volunteer/GSoC-2023 candidate for doing the remaining work for the scanning support in PAPPL. He already studied the PAPPL, AirSane, and sane-airscan projects and this week we will have a video meeting to coordinate the work.
  • Getting Cute - New UI for the Qt Print Dialog: Further e-mail conversation with Harald Sitter from KDE about his plans to improve the UI of Qt’s print dialog. He wants to start when Gaurav Guleria’s CPDB support is in. I recommended him to interact with Gaurav for coordinating and optimizing everything.
  • Google Summer of Code: Making use of the fact that universities and colleges in India are in their winter break now and so students have time. Continued to work with the GSoC-2022 contributors to get their work upstream and already started to integrate GSoC-2023 candidates into the CPDB and PAPPL scanning projects (see above). Also assigned OpenPrinting GitHub issues to GSoC-2023 contributor candidates.
  • Bugs.
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short week (off Monday through Wednesday)

firefox24 firefox

  • uploaded firefox 108.0.2 to ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa for bionic and focal, handed off to security team for upload

misc

  • caught up with email backlog from end-of-year holidays
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  • Packaged the gstreamer 1.20.5 updates for Debian and Ubuntu 23.04
  • Packaged gedit 44 which required updating the tepl library package for the soname bump
  • Requested approval from the Debian Release team to update poppler from 22.08 to 22.12. However, since Debian’s transition freeze is days away now, I think this is unlikely to happen. I should have made the request before end of year holidays but inkscape still had a build test failure at that point. I’m disappointed I missed the deadline.
  • Landed gnome-browser-connector 42 in Debian and Ubuntu 23.04. This is the new name for the system handler for chrome-gnome-shell.
  • Landed mutter 43.2 in Ubuntu 23.04. This had previously been blocked on an armhf build test failure but Simon worked around this.
  • My proposal to enable the AppIndicator and Desktop Icons NG extensions by default didn’t get enthusiastic enough response for me to feel comfortable pushing it this late in Debian 12’s release cycle. I will work on this once Debian 13 development begins later this year since the threshold for potentially disruptive changes is much lower then.
  • Other miscellaneous packaging updates for Debian and Ubuntu 23.04 including initial GNOME 43.3 updates
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  • the liblc3 MIR got approved, promoted and synced the new pipewire from Debian
  • SRUed modemmanager 1.20 to 22.04 as part of hardware enablement for oem
  • debugged gdm not starting on the daily ISO as a side effect of ordering the service cloud-init. Uploaded a fix, thanks Chad for helping to debug and suggesting the solution!
  • tested the thunderbird 102.6.0 candidate snap and promoted to stable
  • added debug print of the checkout revision of debian-cd used for the iso build
  • fixed the versions script erroring out after python-defaults got removed from Debian
  • iterated over the software-properties UI changes started in decembre
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WSL

  • Removed the “switch to shell” button shown during the end of the setup workflow. That feature doesn’t work in WSL.Subiquity #1517
  • Modified Subiquity backend to allow skipping the configuration page during setup. Subiquity #1522
  • Allowed skipping the language selection page in the OOBE in case Subiquity reports language already configured. UDI #1270
  • Removed the advanced configuration page fromt the setup workflow. It’s still present in the recofiguration workflow. UDI #1298
  • Opened a pull request in microsoft/WSL to make the command wsl --list --online show the Ubuntu-22.04 LTS app. microsoft/WSL #9496

Code reviews

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