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.
More days spent trying to bisect kernel graphics corruption in groovy, affecting some Intel Xorg sessions. Figured out which kernel update the regression occurred in, but not yet which commit.
Babysitting of autopkgtest armhf nodes kept going down this week and the machine kept filling up its disk
Cleaned up some small / easy patches to proposed-migration and forwarded them upstream, some got merged now!
Tried to get IS to prioritise some work we need, including introducing me to how they expect us to do Grafana based metrics.
Helped Gunnar with a vte merge which needed to have its patch rewriting
Verified some SRUs
Had a bit of a look into riscv64 preinstalled images not working (daily cdimage spam), ended up handing that over to @xnox and turning off the daily builds until they are likely to work again.
Started rebasing the new autopkgtest environment I worked on last year on top of the last few months of development, will finish that soon and re-deploy the staging environment to make sure it still works well.
helped a bit with the slick-greeter/lightdm regressions in bionic follow a systemd SRU (same issue we recently fixed in libghtdm-gtk-greeter on 20.10)
uploaded SRU fixes for slick and lightdm-gtk greeters to bionic for ^
debugged gnome-boxes segfault on start and reported upstream
fixed snapcraft using the wrong spelling for GTK_USE_PORTAL
helped debugging snap-store having a transparent background with non snapped themes
Updated pulseaudio to the new .3 candidate + ppa build on 20.10 to try for a bug reporter
versions
set up a status report for 20.10
reviewed and merged the python3 port from Marco (basically same work I had and reverted due to the lack of python3 bindings but he added some version checking and fallback)
sponsoring
uplodated Daniel’s fix for plymouth hanging on some multimonitor setups to focal
colord Debian update
SRU
uploaded a sanebackends update to 20.10 to disable the buggy locking code which was impacting plustek devices
helped getting tractions on some recent regressions caused by systemd and glibc SRUs
cherry picked an upstream rhythmbox contributor patch to fix xfade playing with the current gstreamer
thunderbird snap
enabled portal use so remote files can be used
updated the interfaces autoconnect request, with portals removable-media isn’t needed
Tested 7.0.3~lo2 build in libreoffice-prereleases ppa and looks good. Autopkgtests are running now and hoping for a groovy SRU this week.
Network Manager snap
Investigate netplan issue that turned out to just be a network manager issue… if you install the network manager snap and reboot, the system comes back with no networking. You really have to configure network manager before rebooting … or you’re gonna have a bad time!
Misc
@kenvandine and I have signed up for hosting a BoF at LAS this year - an intro to flutter snaps! should be fun!
x11 snap incompatibility with GNOME 3.38’s Wayland session:
The mutter update that will fix Groovy is still in proposed. It is in the Hirsute archive though.
On the snapd side, I made some improvements to @zyga’s snapd PR #9530 (bind mount /tmp/.X11-unix into snaps plugging x11) to add a spread test and fix a few issues uncovered by that test. I’ve given my own review approval to the PR and it has received a positive security review, so it should land soon. That should help in solving the problem quickly on Fedora 33 (where they haven’t backported the Mutter fix), and prepare us for GNOME 4.0 where the abstract socket hasn’t been restored.
snapd dbus activation:
I received a tentative security review approval on snapd PR #8943 (generate D-Bus service activation wrappers), so we could finally see this landed.
The feature is still behind a feature flag (like user-daemons still is), which will need to be made default.
With this feature generally available, we would have all the infrastructure to support snapped gnome-shell search providers.
Other snapd work:
I’m expecting receive security reviews on a number of my other branches soon, so hopefully we can get those merged too.
I put together go-gettext PR #5 as an improvement for the translation support in snapd: reduce the amount of reads and seeks done during start up, instead memory mapping the translation catalogue as glibc/libintl does.
sane-airscan: Waiting for the MIR to get reviewed by the security team.
system-config-printer: Sponsored package uploads for Hugh Chao’s SRU for Focal and Groovy, SRU already got verified.
Linux Foundation Mentorship Program: Mentoring the two IPP Scan students (Client, Server). We have reassigned the student on the client to the server, having both on the server now. Alexander Pevzner will finish the client by himself.
Google Season of Docs 2020: Mentoring our technical writer, doing corrections. Follow his work growing on our web site.
Gnome Shell and friends:
Boot failures:
Bug tracking:
firefox
thunderbird
chromium