Monday 11th February 2019

Desktop Team Updates
3

GNOME 3.32 Beta (3.31.90)

  • Packaged most of GNOME 3.31.90. A few highlights:
    • Most apps have dropped the iconic GNOME 3 app menu and moved the menu items into the app with a ☰ menu. The indicator on the left top bar is still present for this release but will now include the Desktop Actions. Altogether, I think this significantly improves usability of the app menus.
    • Several apps have updated their App IDs to the reverse-domain style (org.gnome.App), affecting the filenames used for their .desktop and app icons. This mostly affects third-party icon themes.
    • The Terminal app now uses a headerbar by default (technically, upstream doesn’t turn it on by default but I expect most distros will).
    • GNOME Builder can edit UI files using libglade.
    • gtk 3.24.5 features updated Adwaita and High Contrast themes. (I uploaded this to Debian Buster.)
  • Rewrote several Debian/Ubuntu patches to apply against the new versions.
  • Reported several bugs to GNOME about a variety of issues I discovered with the new releases. Provided merge requests for several of the issues.
  • Reported a GTK3 regression caught by our build tests which was quickly fixed. GTK3 doesn’t use CI although GTK4 does. I looked into enabling this but there are a few issues (we carry 3 patches to get the build tests working. The 2 recent ATK patches aren’t needed when GTK is built in a full desktop session so I guess we need to figure out how to start some accessibility service in the test environment.)
  • Completed Evolution 3.31.90 transition
  • Completed gtksourceview3 → 4 in Ubuntu main mini-transition
  • Fixed gnome-control-center’s 99_add_lock-on-suspend patch so that it actually works. LP: #938076 has background on why we have this patch. Maybe we could backport this to 18.04 LTS? (It adds a Lock Screen on Suspend switch to Settings > Privacy > Screen Lock.)

Blocked Updates

  • Totem 3.31.90 drops the Zeitgeist plugin. Can we drop it too?
  • gnome-desktop3 introduced a new build test that fails for us (it’s checking Hebrew translation of the clock)
  • I filed a MIR for gsound which is needed for gnome-control-center to migrate out of disco-proposed.
  • GNOME Builder needs the new glib to migrate out of -proposed.
  • GNOME Online Accounts could use a .svg version of the Ubuntu One icon. Could someone else handle this update?
  • libsoup has a lot of test failures so I reported the issue and did not upload.
  • Sound Recorder doesn’t record sounds
  • gvfs can be synced from experimental when the libnfs MIR is approved. I filed Debian bug 921578 which is an apparent blocker for the MIR.

In Debian NEW

  • vala 0.44 series
  • gnome-books (split from gnome-documents)
  • filemanager-actions

Autopkgtest work

Debian

  • Uploaded the GNOME 3.31.90 packages to Experimental
  • Uploaded gnome-control-center with the distro-logo patch we share with Fedora. This adds a nice distro logo to the About page. The Debian implementation uses Debian alternatives (provided in Debian’s desktop-base package) to allow distros to easily substitute their logo without needing to fork key packages like gnome-control-center.
    Ubuntu should implement support for this, but it will take some time to collect the logos and prepare the packaging.
  • Sponsored a similar logo update for GDM.
  • Sponsored a cherry-pick fix for keyboard layouts for GDM
  • Did a libqmi upload to fix the build (blocker for modemmanager update)
  • Discussed GNOME Accessibility concerns
  • Debian enters soft freeze now

Stable Release Updates

Snaps

  • Persuaded the Glade maintainer to accept our YAML file and enabled auto-builds to the candidate channel from glade’s stable branch and to the edge channel from glade’s master branch. TODO: fix the version number so that the Snap Store accepts these builds (the CVS style version tags don’t work with snap’s automatic version handler).
  • Spent time with Ken fighting Launchpad on importing gedit’s git repo. Launchpad is putting up a hard fight.

Other Ubuntu work

Other

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