Desktop Team Updates - Monday 9th March 2020

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.

Last week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates - Monday 2nd March 2020

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  • Fixed a memory leak in snapd-glib markdown parsing, that would be affecting GNOME Software.
  • Released snapd-glib 1.56
  • Fixed bugs in gnome-control-center appearance panel.

zsys:

  • Hugely simplified the code of machine state management, refactored state functions accordingly, added tests and increased test coverage.

Zsys:

  • Hugely simplified the code of machine state management, refactored state functions accordingly, added tests and increased test coverage.
  • Split autoupdate of grub menu on apt upgrade to only have snapshot before apt is running and updating bootloader menu after apt has done its work.
  • Add tracing options to command line
  • Fixes on snapshot
  • Fix some github CI and migrated to V2

Libreoffice

Build Snap

  • worked on gtkmm presence in the build and platform snaps. I believe both snaps have all of the *mm dependencies but for some reason gnome-system-monitor is not seeing it.

freedesktop-sdk with snaps

  • Worked with Valentin and @jamesh to get the freedesktop-sdk enviornment. The next step is to see about how we can create perhaps an lxd container with this setup.
  • travelled to Frankfurt for a sprint
  • focal work
    • new GNOME updates
    • updated the plymouth spinner (new default theme) to include an ubuntu img
    • restored netplan tests by rebuild with a new enough dpkg version (doh)
    • merged alsa lib/utils/plugins with Debian, upstream some changes
    • sponsored some GNOME and Unity updates
    • sponsored the new focal artwork (background and ubiquity slides)
    • restored a poppler fix removed by error
    • fixed plymouth initrd hook to include the correct images
    • did some follow-up fix uploads, better handle no/non default themes
  • hack day
    • added ‘depends also on’ information to proposed migration-by-team report
    • proposed a change to include the timezone in the refresh timestamp
    • proposed a small launchpad ui change to incrase the tag edit entry width
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firefox24 firefox

  • preparing 74.0 update
  • converted packaging branches from bzr to git (not live yet, need to double check a few details before switching over)
  • now building firefox in focal with clang 10, which was just made the default there
  • looked into getting Node.js 12.16.1 in focal and into backporting it to all supported releases (submitted a couple of merge requests to the Debian package maintainers)

chromium22 chromium

package24 other

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(This is for 2 weeks, from which 1 was the Engineering Sprint in Frankfurt)

  • Snapcraft, Snap Store: Discussed with people of the Snapcraft and Snap Store groups on the Sprint in Franfurt about the design of hardware-associated snaps, to allow Snap Store searches based on hardware signatures and make/model names of hardware devices, so that drivers and other hardware-specific software can be easily found in the Store. Posted an appropriate feature request in the forum.
  • Snapcraft: Further discussion about an interface through which snapped apps can print via the CUPS snap. Especially talked with @ijohnson on the Sprint and we need, similar to PulseAudio or Docker, a “cups” interface where the apps plug to in order to print and to access D-Bus notifications about printer and job status and a “cups-control” interface where the CUPS Snap provides its services. See my comment on the thread. We need to have a meeting of me, @ijohnson, and @jdstrand to talk about the best design for that. According to @jamesh, the PuldeAudio snap which its interfaces is also able to use the same domain socket for both a playback-only and a recording interface, but with patches on the PulseAudio code.
  • Printer Application Framework: Started supporting CUPS as IPP printer emulator as it is much better in handling PPDs than ippeveprinter which was the only emulator supported before. Reviewed added work on option support for the ippeveprinter emulation from the student who originally created the framework.
  • cups-filters: Released version 1.27.2 upstream fixing the problem of foomatic-rip not being able to print certain PostScript files and a crasher in cups-browsed.
  • cups-filters: Fixed build of the test programs of libfontembed to find the test font at more places and to not crash if the test font is missing Pull Request #214.
  • SANE: Finally got version 1.0.29 into Focal! Investigated the failures of the autopkg tests, reported them in the update request bug report and got a fixed upload from Gianfranco Costamagna (locutusofborg). Also thanks to @laney to deactivate the autopkgtest of gscan2pdf on arm64. And some praise from a user.
  • HPLIP: Still not able to put up version 3.20.2 for a hardware enablement FFE as this upstream version is not printing on several distributions. The Debian version 3.20.2+dfsg0-3 seems to solve the problem by reverting the offending upstream change. Waiting for reactions of users.
  • pyppd: Released version 1.1.0 upstream to stop the memory hogging and incorporate all Debian/Ubuntu patches.
  • sane-airscan: The author, Alexander Pevzner, has expanded the backend to be a universal backend for high-level scanning protocols. He added WSD/WS-Scan and tells that adding IPP-Scan by a GSoC student should be easy (800-1000 code lines). GitHub branch.
  • Linux Foundation Member Summit 2020, Lake Tahoe, CA: Cancelled by the Linux Foundation due to the Corona virus, so I am at home this week.
  • Google Summer of Code 2020: All mentors for OpenPrinting registered. We are 12! Introduced students to their projects, assigned OpenPrinting bugs to new candidates.
  • Bugs.
2 Likes
  • Was off yesterday
  • Worked on updating GNOME shell and friends, currently waiting for updates for the default extensions from @3v1n0 before I can make any more progress
  • Started trying to port libproxy to mozjs68 so we don’t have two mozjs versions around, needs more work
  • Worked a bit on KGB (commit bot) so that we can have it announce ubuntu changes into #ubuntu-desktop
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  • Sprint in Frankfurt last week and swapped yesterday.
  • Working on changing the gstreamer1.0-packagekit recommends for gnome-software to complete the transition to the snap
  • Sprinted all week
  • Worked in gnome-shell extensions to update the dock to support changes for gnome 3.35.92
  • Fixed various issue of gnome-shell appindicator extension
  • Started migration to ubuntu packages salsa.debian.org (will followup to that)
1 Like