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.
sponsored the n-m autopkgtest fix from Till, tests work again (but are flaky so still some work to be done)
reviewed/sponsored an unity-settings-daemon/upower fix
Removed and old undocumented pulseaudio distro patch that force loaded the bell sound; GNOME is doing that and the patch was leading to issues for some users
GNOME updates (gnome-calculator, orc, yelp)
Fixed activitity-log-manager ftbfsing
Sent a merge request to fix the whoopsie ftbfs
The daily ISO didn’t get copied to current for a while (thanks duflu for noticing & mentioning on IRC), tried to understand how we can deal better with those cases
SRU
SRUed youtube-dl fixes to follow upstream website changes (Disco/Bionic)
SRUed a libarchive fix for zip archive confusing directories and files (bionic)
SRUed an iputils IPv6 fix to bionic (thanks Laney for the hint on how to test IPv6)
Other
sent a snapd MP to make the snapd user service not being listed as an user software in gnome-session-properties
Reported a gbp improvement request to Debian to ask to warn when doing a gbp import on an outdated checkout
Trello board maintainance, sent some email to get feedback about the workflow changes and about starting the july iteration
merged geckodriver, autopkgtest and testsuite changes to all the beta branches and successfully built in the firefox-next PPA − this means that the next stable release will have autopkgtests again
thunderbird
60.7.2+build2 published to all stable releases
chromium
investigating kopano-webapp autopkgtests failure triggered by the migration to the chromium snap
investigated sphinx autopkgtest failures, it turns out this is a Python 3.7.4 regression that’s already fixed upstream, so next upload should resolve it
In order to extend snap-store to manage traditional .deb packages, we need to expose the host system package manager to the snap sandbox.
The first thought was to use aptdaemon and libapt-pkg, but this doesn’t look workable at least in the short term: the library and daemon are tightly coupled, so there is no guarantee that the library inside the snap will be able to use the host system’s daemon or package caches. So at least in the short term, the plan is to continue using PackageKit.
I’ve been working on two new snapd interfaces to support this: appstream-metadata providing access to information about installed and available packages on the host system, and packagekit-control providing access to the PackageKit D-Bus service. By keeping these separate, the AppStream interface could be paired up with a PackageKit successor interface.
PR #7042 implementing appstream-metadata is essentially complete and waiting for review. Robert took a quick look over to make sure it was sane, but it needs a real review.
PR #7054 implementing packagekit-control has unit tests but needs a spread test. My current plan is to snap a copy of the pkcon command line tool and use that to verify that we can talk to the host system PackageKit.
Other snapd PRs:
I’m still working to get my other snapd PRs (icon themes, user session agent) landed. I’m in communication with the snapd developers to push them forward.
network-manager: Further investigations of the autopkgtest script nm.py as sometimes the tests failed, typically due to a timeout on the emulated Wifi AP not coming up. Submitted a debuggability improvement to avoid that the script hangs and autopkgtest finally kills it after 2 hours without a chance to know where it got stuck.
network-manager: Investigated Bionic SRU regression and asked on upstream mailing list whether there is a possible fix, no answer yet. Also asked on #nm Freenode channel but no one seems to be listening there.
Google Summer of Code 2019: First month’s evaluations done. All the 11 students (including the 5 for OpenPrinting) have passed and go on working for the second month. The OpenPrinting students also were very content with their mentors. Continued guiding the students on the Printer Application snap framework and on the Common Print Dialog Backends integration on the GTK print dialog.
Linux Plumber’s Conference 2019 in Lisbon: Organization of micro-conferences has started.