Monday 17th December 2018

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 the Community Hub (this site).
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: Monday 10th December
Next week’s notes are here: Monday 24th December 2018 🎄 🎅

2 Likes
  • :convenience_store: Gnome Software
    • :white_check_mark: Updated PR to use Gnome Online Accounts for authentication
  • :railway_track: Tracker
    • Start to take a look at Issue 59 and https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/tracker/issues/61 that are preventing use to build the debian package using meson
    • Spent some time to understand how to properly run autopkgtest in my own machine
    • :white_check_mark: PR to use dbus-run-session instead of dbus-launch
    • :white_check_mark: PR to install gschema in the build directory in order to allow running tests without having to install tracker
    • :gear: install dbus services file in the build directory
    • :gear: fix memory leaks/memory corruption in tests
  • :hospital: LivePatch
    • Start to move livepatch in a different page in software-properties

rls bugs:

  • “gnome session: Must ask twice to lock the screen”: Blocked as before because I cannot reproduce the bug
  • “Ubuntu dock/launcher is shown on the lock screen”: partial fix released in disco, waiting for review in cosmic https://github.com/micheleg/dash-to-dock/pull/848
4 Likes

:racing_car: Gnome Shell performance (stutter | latency | CPU):

:sparkles: Gnome Shell visual fixes:

:speaker: PulseAudio:

:mag_right: Nvidia EGLStreams/EGLDevice analysis continued and concluded:

:bug: Bug management:

3 Likes
  • sponsored pulseaudio merge from Daniel
  • reviewed/sponsored alsa-lib changes from the oem team
  • SRUed a nautilus fix for captions showing in the wrong order (cosmic/bionic)
  • SRUed a network-manager-applet fix for selecting certificates with a space in their filename (bionic)
  • backported & SRUed a gedit fix for the ‘recently open document’ filter not working with uppercases (debian/cosmic/bionic)
  • launchpad bugs triaging (focus on gnome-control-center)
1 Like
  • Updated the MP for the new installer, rebased on trunk and restested image builds.
  • Updated curtin MP following the review from the server team and retested.
  • Started a white paper on the integration of Ubuntu with Active Directory
  • Caught up with emails after holidays.

This was a short week, I was offline on Friday.

firefox24 firefox

  • 64.0 was released as a stable update to all supported series (trusty, xenial, bionic, cosmic, disco)

chromium22 chromium

  • updated dev to 72.0.3626.14
  • updated beta to 72.0.3626.17
  • prepared stable update to 71.0.3578.98

libreoffice24-margin libreoffice

  • fixed s390x autopkgtest failures (bug #1808147) and backported to cosmic

:bug: rls-bb-tracking bugs

  • bug #1754671 in network-manager: @willcooke’s testing is conclusive, we agreed to upload to bionic-proposed and leave it there for (at least) the duration of the Xmas break to give it wider and in-depth testing
  • bug #1765304 in gnome-shell: verified (by myself and others)
  • bug #1802208 in libreoffice: no progress this week

:bug: rls-cc-tracking bugs

  • bug #1765304 in gnome-shell: in unapproved queue, but the bug doesn’t really affect cosmic anyway
  • bug #1803142 in libreoffice: was accepted in cosmic-proposed, but I had to do another upload to fix autopkgtests on s390x, so back in the unapproved queue

was a bit of a short week, since I was off on Friday

rls: I do have bug #1805857 assigned, which I didn’t work on this week. Looks like 1.12.6 didn’t fix it, so still something to do here. That’ll be one of my tasks before xmas.

  • cups-browsed: Eliminated infinite loop and CPU hogging by cupsd due to cups-browsed trying to re-create queues which itself removed.
  • cups-filters: Released 1.21.6 with a lot of fixes on cups-browsed.
  • OpenPrinting, foomatic-db: Received PostScript PPDs from Canon for the first time. Added them to the database.
  • network manager: Chat with Ken, received roadmap
  • Bugs.

Till

snapd dbus-activation:

  • Still progressing on PR #6258. It is mostly done, but needs review.
  • While updating the tests to use a confined client app so they could function on Ubuntu Core, I discovered activation triggered by confined apps was broken on 18.04+. I initially tried fixing this with a change to the AppArmor rules, but @jdstrand instead pointed me at the AssumedAppArmor key that can be placed in D-Bus service files.
  • I came up with some ideas to fix up the incompatibilities with 14.04, which I’m testing at the moment. If those are acceptable, it should get rid of the question about Trusty support.

snapd desktop portal testing

  • At the moment, all of snapd’s tests for portal support run against a fake version of xdg-desktop-portal, or a filesystem hierarchy that resembles that provided by xdg-document-portal. It doesn’t test behaviour against the real thing.
  • I started PR #6313 to address this. The idea is to test against the real xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-document-portal with a fake UI service. This allows testing of things like the portal file chooser API without trying to drive a GUI from the test harness.
  • The plan is to only run the test on a few systems where we know portals should work. As we SRU portals to older Ubuntu releases, we can expand the list of systems to verify that they work with snaps.

snap application polkit support

  • A while back Ken asked me to look at what would be needed to allow snapped daemons to make use of polkit authorisation (e.g. for things like fwupd).
  • I started a thread on the forum outlining what I think is needed. The main open question is whether namespacing polkit action IDs to a snap is acceptable. Without namespacing, it is not clear we can safely let snaps install new .policy files.
  • At present, the forum thread is the extent of my work on this: it was a task to look at after sorting out dbus activation / shell search providers.
  • Sponsored about a dozen uploads so that we could have the newest fontmake and friends.
  • Cherry-picked Unicode/Emoji 11 support from GNOME 3.32’s version of pango down to Debian Buster and Ubuntu 19.04 (Ubuntu 18.10 SRU is in the queue). At this time, I don’t plan to SRU that to 18.04 LTS (it has an older pango so it would be more complicated to backport there).
  • Packaged gtk 3.24.2. This version had some regressions so I’m planning to wait for 3.24.3 before SRUing to 18.10. The known regressions are fixed, but this way we won’t be immediately out of date there.
  • Identified some emoji fixes from 3.24.2 I am backporting to 18.04 LTS: LP: #1807719 (some emoji in chooser are black & white) and LP: #1807721 (crash when trying to use variant selector in emoji chooser).
  • Prepared the gnome-desktop SRUs for 18.04 and 18.10 to fix the 32-bit thumbnail issue that Laney fixed upstream. Security is handling 18.04.
  • Uploaded buildstream to Debian’s NEW queue.
  • Packaged devhelp 3.30. It needed amtk packaged first. devhelp has a soname bump so it’s also in the NEW queue. I demoted devhelp to universe last cycle so that we wouldn’t need to do a MIR for amtk.
  • Fixed the build tests for tepl (required by latest GNOME Latex release [previously latexila]).
  • Encouraged Debian to update to poppler 0.71 (it’s in experimental now). Sponsored popplerkit.framework and NMU’d kitinerary to make the transition easier.
  • Helped with yaml-cpp transition
  • Got ruby-gitlab and python-gitlab to both stop shipping /usr/bin/gitlab
  • Discussed the Epiphany browser upstream maintainer’s concerns about the browser being included in Debian and Ubuntu LTS releases. He would prefer users use a Flatpak or Snap version. (A Snap version doesn’t exist yet.), His concerns aren’t mostly about epiphany itself but about its dependencies: webkit2gtk, gstreamer, glib-networking, which need to be updated for websites like YouTube to keep working.

Other

  • I’m going to work on the sane-backends issue this week.
  • I had some hardware issues with my computer this week that interrupted my productivity.
  • portal-test
    • Patched to detect snap confinement
    • Did some testing with portal-test to see which features aren’t working
  • Sponsored flatpak 1.0.6 to cosmic and bionic