Monday 3rd June 2019

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 27th May 2019
Next week’s notes are here: Monday 10th June 2019

2 Likes
  • USN snap refreshes
  • Updates for the epiphany snap and proposed a PR adding snap packaging upstream
  • Fixed some layouts related issues with gnome-characters snap
  • opened tracks as needed to fix building bionic images as well as some arm64 fixes

:beach_umbrella: Monday is a holiday so I am writing this early…

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

  • :recycle: Chasing down reported test failures in: Geometric (OpenGL-less) picking
  • :new: High framerate monitor support is coming to Ubuntu 18.04 updates within weeks. It’s already in later releases. See the below Release bugs section.
  • :mag: Spent a day exploring a new optimization which reduces input latency by one frame (different to last time). It works, but seems to risk framerate smoothness too much for now. On hold pending other optimizations to boost framerates first…
  • :new: Proposed a significant improvement to Nvidia (on Xorg) framerate smoothness. Being forced to use Nvidia for a few weeks, I am also investigating its unique performance problems.

:beetle: Release bugs:

:pick: Backlogs progress:

  • :chart_with_downwards_trend: Good news (falling backlogs): firefox, libreoffice, xorg
  • :chart_with_upwards_trend: Bad news (consistently growing backlogs): ubiquity
1 Like

libreoffice24-margin libreoffice

Epiphany epiphany

GNOME build-snap

3rd (delayed) national holiday

GNOME World

  • Merged memory fixes and tests malloc usage force (to check better memory errors) [!581]
  • GNOME shell Background actors double-dispostion fix [!558]
  • Proposed big GNOME Shell refactory (this.actor-removal) to replace many wrapper classes with proper Clutter.Actor classes [!559]
  • Reiteration on window menu-activation fixes, merged after review [!564]
  • Merged grabHelper: Throw an error if the owner is not an actor [!596]
  • Use more GObject derived classes in GNOME Shell [!563]
  • grabHelper: Throw an error if the owner is not an actor !565]
  • Fixed reallocation cycle, iconGrid: Hide children outside allocation loop [!566]
  • Refactory on DND system in GNOME Shell using GObject interfaces and reimplementing objects to suppor them [3v1n0/gnome-shell/!1]
  • Gjs DBus wrapper support for DBus flags parameter [!297]
  • Gjs, remove legacy Lang usage and cleanup strings [!298]
  • Proposed System.addressOfGObject to Gjs for debugging better memory errors [!296]
  • Fixed toString() method in Gjs GObject’s implementing an interface [!299]
  • Added support to pass native JS objects to GJS objects, still to push but almost ready

Ubuntu’ing

  • SRU Verifications

PS: About to fly back to Europe.

1 Like
  • one day off
  • Eoan serie work
    • deleted the deprecated n-m libs from the archive
    • updated gnome-control-center 3.32.2 to Debian/Eoan
    • Updated network-manager-gnome to the current version
    • Updated epiphany-browser to the current version in eoan, SRUed to disco
  • SRU
    • SRUed the current 3.28 epiphany-browser to Bionic, pinged the security team about updating the CVE status for an issue fixed in the update
    • SRUed the current 3.32 epiphany-browser version back to Disco
    • rebased/reuploaded a curl cosmic SRU after it got rejected because superseeded by a security upload
    • SRU verifications (gnome-software/xenial, eds,evolution,ews/cosmic, network-manager-fortisslvpn/bionic, ubuntu-report/bionic, gnome-calendar/disco, nautilus/disco)
    • cleared out a failed SRU attempt for livepatch UI backport to xenial, that would need more work and isn’t a priority
    • SRUed g-c-c 3.32.2 back to Disco
    • SRUed g-c-c fixes for an invalid suspend delay value and a rounding error in the monitor config code to Bionic
    • Did another upload of software-properties to deal with a regression report, made s-p-common depends on python3-requests-unixsocket
  • Other
    • talked to Ken/Marcus about getting the epiphany-browser snap updated
    • Hacked a bionic version report (https://people.canonical.com/~platform/desktop/bionic/versions.html) to give us an idea of what needs to be updated (it has issues and isn’t set up as a regular job atm but it gives us an idea what updates we could work on)
    • looked at the work for the new cycle, did some tweaking to the trello board with experimenting with a june iteration
1 Like

4 days week

  • ZFS:
    • Fix some performance issues + other deadlocks/cleanage in grub testing
    • Add new options for tests to target a specific
      15_linux_zfs for grub generation
    • Fix some assets trailing whispace issues
    • Rebase initramfs + grub menu generation on new
      upstream version (0.8 branch)
    • Test integration tests (golang bindings) + grub menu generation with libzfs 0.8 (but still 0.7 kernels modules)
    • Worked on ZFS planning (https://github.com/orgs/ubuntu/projects/1)
  • Misc:
    • Tracker-miners segfault fix (eoan + disco)
    • MIR discussions
    • Vote on Guadec talks
2 Likes

firefox24 firefox

thunderbird24 thunderbird

  • 60.7.0 was published to all supported Ubuntu releases

chromium22 chromium

  • updating beta to 75.0.3770.75, still looking into build failures on arm64
  • updated dev to 76.0.3806.1

libreoffice24-margin libreoffice

  • sponsored Marcus’s upload of the 6.2.4 SRU to disco
  • sponsored Marcus’s SRUs to bionic and cosmic for bug #1798074

package24 other

1 Like
  • cups-filters: Released 1.24.0 upstream for the integration of Deepak Patankar’s Google Summer of Code 2018 project with the main goal of clustering different printers with cups-browsed and automatically selecting the destination printers by job content and option/attribute settings. To achieve this, several other features got added to cups-browsed, especially support for mixed clusters of remote CUPS queues and native IPP printers and not downloading PPDs from remote CUPS servers any more. All changes of this release are done by Deepak as parts of his project.
  • system-config-printer: Moved upstream hosting from Zdenek Dohnal’s (s-c-p’s current upstream maintainer, works at Red Hat) private GitHub to the GitHub of OpenPrinting, but Zdenek continues as upstream maintainer.
  • cups: Sponsored upload for a CUPS SRU posted by Dariusz Gadomski, to fix an issue with PreserveJobHistory and PreserveJobLog settings in cupsd.conf.
  • network-manager: Unfortunately, no one of the reporters of the regressions on the Bionic SRU answered my request for log files. they only answered earlier that adding the systemd SRU from my PPA did not solve the problem.
  • network-manager: Started investigating autopkg test failure in Eoan.
  • Google Summer of Code 2019: Mentoring student on making pdftoraster filter of cups-filters not using unstable Poppler APIs any more. Student is much ahead of time and will finish early. Probably we will give him some additional task.
  • Bugs.
2 Likes
  • Started to look into non ancient technologies (Juju 2 …) for autopkgtest, and began a rewrite of the charm
  • Got the GDM RegisterSession MR merged
  • Small updates to Nautilus, mainly to fix a CVE in Debian
  • Small reviews / discusson on autopkgtest big_package handling (needs to handle globs, e.g. for linux-*)

snap user session agent:

  • I have the basic REST interface hooked into snap userd with some unit tests. I am still working on the spread test to ensure everything gets installed correctly and works on target platforms. I’ll hopefully get the PR up tomorrow.

snapd layouts/mount bug:

  • While working on a snap, I wanted to have theme data from gtk-common-themes appear under /usr/share/themes. This involved using a content interface plug to mount it under $SNAP/share/themes, then use layouts to bind $SNAP/share/themes to /usr/share/themes. This worked, but resulted in a snap that could not be upgraded: snapd would throw an error when trying to update the mount namespace during the upgrade.
  • I managed to simplify the bug down to a minimal version using only layouts at bug #1831010, which was enough for @zyga to fix in snapd PR #6937.

WA Day:

  • Monday was a public holiday in Western Australia. Went to the SOTA festival to see John Butler.