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.
Prepared a landing on debian of mutter, now moved to meson (and so many fixes and changes needed) and gnome-shell 3.31.4, to be landed later as per too-many-patches (but proposed upstream)
GNOME’ing around
Lots of cherry-picks on mutter and gnome-shell stable branches
The offscreen effect/zoom fix landed upstream this week, and in disco too, thanks Marco and Laney. This resolves a number of bugs (most notably restoring usable desktop zoom) but also makes offscreening much more efficient so we can use it to improve performance in the future. The only performance case I think will benefit immediately would be the sliding of shell popup menus.
Revised, retested, discussed and fixed conflicts in other merge requests:
prepared firefox 65.0+build2 update (in disco and PPA)
thunderbird
60.4.0+build2 blocked in disco-proposed because of enigmail autopkgtest regression, need to investigate (but this doesn’t appear to be a regression caused by the thunderbird update)
network-manager: Selected test gear with the help of cyphermox, ordered it, received it completely, and set it up, all is working as intended: Ubiquiti Unifi router, PoE switch, access point, cloud key, Huawei 4G USB mobile network modem.
Google Summer of Code 2019: Communicated with an interested student about possible projects, he is most interested in the IPP scan server project (SANE-supported scanner emulates IPP network scanner). Also selected some cups-filters bugs student candidates could work on during the selection process.
OpenPrinting web site: Several of the former GSoC students are now actively working on the new site, with one of them coordinating everything.
Investigated the auto-multiple-choice autopkgtest failures. I think we can fix it by dropping the use of “stock” (deprecated) icons in the app. Meanwhile, Seb added a dependency on adwaita-icon-theme-full. I verified that the app appears to run fine without extra icon themes installed.
Investigated the ldc build failure. I wasn’t able to get any further on this than doko who disabled the Debian patches to use the system zlib.
Disco
Reported the libflatpak dependency issue to xdg-desktop-portal. The developer fixed the issue before I had the time to look into it. New xdg-desktop-portal versions are in disco now with improved hardening of the email portal requested by Ubuntu Security.
Since the pcre2 MIR was approved this week, I dropped our revert-pcre2 diffs and patches from vte2.91, gnome-terminal, gnome-builder, tilix, xfce4-terminal, git, libpam-mount, and wget. This will make it much easier for us to keep GNOME Terminal and GNOME Builder up-to-date.
Fixed a critical gnome-menus issue and added CI to GNOME Gitlab and Debian Salsa to catch this kind of error in the future. I plan to look into doing this check with an autopkgtest too.
SRUs
Verified the totem and nestopia SRUs for bionic and cosmic
Investigated the gnome-desktop regression in my SRU that Seb discovered. This took quite a bit of time to prepare 18.04 and 18.10 32-bit installs.
Snaps
Snapped the GNOME Hitori game. It is pending review by Snap Store adminstrators
Converted gedit to core18
Got gedit git master building again
Tried to add gedit-plugins as part of the gedit snap but I had trouble with vala include directories
Spent some time looking into the existing bug where gedit’s Python plugins don’t work because of an issue in how we are using libpeas. I wasn’t able to solve this one yet either.
GNOME
Fixed gedit’s built-in filebrowser plugin after the meson conversion
Helped review meson conversions for Hitori and Yelp
Participated in big GNOME Online Accounts providers discussion (Todoist and GNOME Documents integration will likely be dropped in GNOME 3.32)
Debian
Reviewed nautilus-python python3 merge request. Maybe this will wait until after Buster’s release.
Monday was a public holiday in Australia (the Australia Day long weekend). There was a half hour of fireworks released from barges in the middle of the river.
xdg-desktop-portal integration tests:
I received feedback on snapd PR #6313, and am working through the review comments. I hope to get it landed this week: as well as a ensuring snapd doesn’t break behaviour we care about in future, it offers a base to validate our xdg-desktop-portal back ports.
snapd D-Bus activation:
I had a chat with mvo about the status of my pull requests related to this feature. We plan to have another hangout this week with a few more of the snapd core team, so hopefully we can get any remaining blockers sorted out.
Once D-Bus activation is supported in snapd, adding support for gnome-shell search providers will be relatively straight forward. That should give us feature parity for the gnome-calculator snap vs. the .deb package.
gtk-common-themes/Yaru build:
Yaru PR #1137 was merged, which adds a Meson build option to install compatibility files for the old communitheme name. Once I update gtk-common-themes MR !8 to use this, we’ll be sure that Yaru and Communitheme in the gtk-common-themes snap are in sync.
Next step is to experiment with manually triggering the gitlab CI pipeline with parameters, as a way to build versions of the gtk-common-themes snap with a custom Yaru branch. When that works, all the code for building gtk-common-themes in Yaru’s CI can be removed: instead it will just trigger the corresponding job in gitlab CI.
Gnome Shell
Live patch
Tracker:
Gnome Shell performance (
The 
Revised, retested, discussed and fixed conflicts in other merge requests:
Unplanned detours:
Bug management:
Good news (falling backlogs): nautilus, firefox, gnome-control-center, xorg, gnome-terminal, thunderbird, gedit
Bad news (consistently growing backlogs): ubiquity
firefox
thunderbird
chromium
snaps