Monday 5th November 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 29th October 2018
Next week’s notes are here: Monday 12th November 2018

3 Likes
  • gitlab runner maintenance
  • Updated some GNOME snaps to latest upstream:
    • evince
    • eog
    • gnome-calculator
    • gedit
  • Published first snap (gnome-chess) built with base: core18 and using the gnome-3-28-1804 platform snap.
  • Opened stable/ubuntu-19.04 tracks for seeded snaps
3 Likes
2 Likes

Gjs:

Nautilus:

Systemd (logind):

  • reproposed a simplified version of my PR.

Snap:

  • Fixed desktop-helper PR.
  • Telegram-desktop: discussed some things with upstream, so now every upstream build will automatically go to edge via build.snapcraft.io, while stable builds are generated via manual pushes of the author to launchpad (via this recipe, and same for betas).

Xorg:

2 Likes

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

:bug: Bug management:

  • :closed_umbrella: Bug traffic is back to normal now. The recent spike only lasted 1.5 weeks after 18.10 was released.
  • :chart_with_upwards_trend: Backlogs progress :chart_with_downwards_trend: :
    • The stand-out feature is still the falling Firefox backlog.
    • Interestingly, the two backlogs growing most consistently (ubiquity and xorg-server) are also projects expected to be deprecated in future.
6 Likes

My week:

  • HPLIP/Ippusbxd/system-config-printer: Investigating to prioritize driverless IPP printing for all printers including HP. Checking whether scanning on HP’s multi-function devices will still work then. This avoids failures caused by the HPLIP and the need of HP’s proprietary plugin in many cases.
  • cups-filters: Investigating problem of duplicate application of page management operations (multiple copies, N-up, selected pages, …) by IPP printer and pdftopdf CUPS filter.
  • ghostscript: Forwarded more bugs in the 9.25 update to the security team. They have fixed them all now.
  • OpenPrinting web site: Weekly meeting with former GSoC students for web site renovation.
  • Bugs

By the way:

  • Avahi upstream maintainership urgently needed!
1 Like

My updates:

4-day weeks

3 Likes
  • Continued working on systemd --user stuff, made a bunch of fixes. Trying to work out a cleaner gnome-settings-daemon setup there atm.
  • We got a new release name (disco dingo); helped out with some of the required tasks to get development started.
  • autopkgtest maintenance
    • make the worker machine more reliable under really heavy load (by providing it with more disk space).
    • debug some cloud instability and work with IS to restart the necessary stuff.
  • A couple of random reviews / uploads.
  • only 3 works days
  • reviewed plans for D-cycle
  • reviewed rls-bb-tracking buglist
  • debugged livepatch notfications not being reliable - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-notifier/+bug/1800862
  • changed g-i-s to point to the correct legal webpage
  • SRUs
    • SRUed a g-s-d fix to allow starting the gnome-calculator snap from the corresponding key (cosmic)
    • SRUed a fix to the evince apparmor profile to fix pdf thumbnails (cosmic)
    • SRUed bolt 0.5 to bionic
    • SRUed polari update fixing connecting to server to cosmic
    • reviewed/sponsored gnome-calculator SRU from Marco to bionic
    • SRUed gedit 3.30.2 to cosmic
    • sponsored update-manager/livepatch reminder change from Andrea to bionic
    • sponsored g-i-s/livepatch error handling fix from Andrea to bionic, reverted also buggy privacy url change from my previous SRU which failed verification
    • SRUed geoclue agent-regrestation-timeout increase

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

firefox24 firefox

  • created disco bzr branches
  • preparing 63.0.1+build4 update
  • prepared nodejs-mozilla packages for trusty, xenial and bionic, waiting for feedback from the security team

chromium22 chromium

  • updated beta to 71.0.3578.30
  • updated dev to 72.0.3595.2

libreoffice24-margin libreoffice

  • uploaded 6.0.7 SRU to bionic (bug #1799230)
  • built 6.1.3 snap and published in the candidate channel
  • uploaded 6.1.3 to disco

snapcraft24 snaps

package24 other

1 Like
  • New installer: Discussed the layered squashfs image model with @didrocks and investigated how to implement it in live-build.
  • New Disco images are available. Tested it but it’s broken (bug 1801408 - Crashes with usrmerge)
  • Continued upgrade and installer bug triaging

Yaru GTK 3.18 theme:

  • Yaru PR #935 has been merged now. Since last week, I fixed the appearance of switches, and some visual glitches on header bars.
  • After being merged, I went to check that it looked okay in the gtk-common-themes snap. I noticed that things didn’t look quite right, which seems to be due to the way Yaru’s CI tries to rebuild gtk-common-themes (some files are not organised correctly). I detailed the problem with some possible solutions at Yaru issue #953. It’s not a critical issue right now: we just need to ensure any snaps we promote from edge were built on gitlab CI.

Fontconfig:

  • With an eye towards improving first run performance of snaps, I’ve been looking at backporting the UUID cache handling for Bionic’s fontconfig.
  • This is mainly interesting for use inside snaps, as those built on core18 end up regenerating caches on first run on cosmic+. The reverse is not true, with new fontconfig being able to reuse caches on bionic as is. If we can get it SRU’d into bionic, all the better.
  • This still doesn’t address the issues with xenial, where we’re talking cache version 6 vs. cache version 7 though.

GTK 2 themes with snaps:

  • I’ve continued to answer questions on the auto-connect request forum thread. We’ve got a +1 from @jdstrand so hopefully this can move forward soon.
  • The discussion went a bit off topic with some questions about GTK 3 theme compatibility. I was able to point at the work we’ve done to backport Yaru as an example of how the existing content interface slot we’re using can support applications using multiple GTK 3 versions.

Misc:

  • I filed a bug report about some ideas for how a “settings portal” could be used to fix the theme selection issue on Wayland. Upstream has taken some of those ideas and run with it, so those changes will probably percolate down by the time we care about them.
  • A merge request for gtk-common-themes to essentially turn the exported “communitheme” into an alias for Yaru through a combination of symlinks and theme inheritance.
  • A pull for Yaru that bundles assets into a gtk.gresources file. This reduces the overhead of loading the theme by bundling everything together into a single file that GTK can memory map, rather than having to open each asset individually.