Monday 7th January 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 24th December 2018 🎄 🎅
Next week’s notes are here: https://community.ubuntu.com/t/monday-14th-january-2019/9344

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:beach_umbrella: Vacation

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

:bug: Bug management:

  • Only one work day since last status report on 24 Dec 2018, spent catching up on bug mail and triage. So the chart doesn’t look as bad as it would otherwise…
  • :pick: Backlogs progress:
    • :chart_with_downwards_trend: Good news (falling backlogs): None.
    • :chart_with_upwards_trend: Bad news (consistently growing backlogs): ubiquity
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  • Eaten loads of panettone
  • Some FTBFS unity projects reviews, prepared cosmic SRU for ucc
  • Started debugging a gdm login issue I’ve in my main VM machin after dist-upgrade to disco
  • Back at looking Xrandr scaling branch with some cleanups I had planned
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Debian

  • Added or restored -Wl,-O1 optimization to Debian GNOME packages. I had accidentally removed it about a year ago because I confused it with -O1
  • Worked around base-files to fix piuparts issue with chrome-gnome-shell’s Chrome override shipped in /etc/opt/
  • Cherry-picked an important patch for gcr for glib 2.59 compatibility (GNOME 3.32)
  • Cherry-picked geary build fix for latest stable vala
  • devhelp mini-transition
  • Made gnome-software recommend fwupd
  • Pushed andyrock’s libgtop2 “ignore snap mounts” patch to Debian so we’re in sync
  • Packaged bolt 0.7 and worked with upstream to fix a build test failure
  • Packaged gitg 3.30.1 and worked with upstream to fix a build issue
  • Packaged libgda update which required some work to fix the build flags
  • Packaged 3.304 update for Evolution suite
  • Switch gupnp from python2 to python3
  • Fixed python-apt to recognize Buster

Ubuntu

  • Add libsane1 transitional package and suggested it to Debian
  • Did rebuilds for liblouis, lm-sensors and gdal transitions. (lm-sensors rebuilds were needed for sane-backends to build)
  • Merged gnome-software with Debian and reduced our diff to Ubuntu patches and the ubuntu-software package addition
  • Merged totem with Debian and reduced our diff a bit
  • Sponsored gparted/bionic SRU to fix LVM issue
  • Sponsored gjs/bionic 1.52.5 SRU

GNOME Settings

  • Made an accepted suggestion that GNOME Settings’ new Application panel should
    not hard-depend on libflatpak (because it may be difficult for it to be in Ubuntu main)
  • Night Light redesign has landed including a Color Temperature switcher
  • Many accessibility fixes (some are still being reviewed)

Other GNOME stuff

  • Removed aisleriot’s app menu. Submitted patches to drop intltool, add a Keyboard Shortcuts overlay and open the Select Game dialog for the New Game action.
  • Proposed removing Sundry category, need to ping people about this.
  • Fixed GNOME Software app to build with -W1,-z,-defs again.

old GNOME removals

  • Packaged pdfarranger, a maintained fork of pdfshuffler. pdfarranger
    was ported to gtk3 and allows Debian and Ubuntu to remove the python-poppler package
  • Did an NMU for gjots allowing gnome-python to be removed from Debian & Ubuntu soon
  • Removed rarian from Debian (Ubuntu removal pending)
  • Removed clutter-gesture
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  • cups-filters: Investigated the way how the properties of IPP printers are polled via get-printer-attributes IPP request, as on some printers the result was incomplete GitHub pull request #86.,
  • cups-browsed: Fixed crash when applying BrowseFilter directives from the config file.
  • cups-filters: Applied several patches to make the filters build with Poppler 0.72.
  • system-config-printer: Applied upstream patch to suppress error pop-ups on driverless IPP printers.
  • QPDF news: Upstream completed support to flatten filled PDF forms. This will soon be used in cups-filters to eliminate the need of slowish workarounds.
  • network-manager: Started studying on how it works.
  • Bugs.

Till

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snapd dbus activation and user daemons:

  • I rebased PR #5822 (systemd user daemons) and PR #6258 (dbus service activation) to make sure they’re still all functional post-break.
  • This is primarily waiting on review from the snapd folks. I’ve got dbus activation working on all platforms, spread backends, but with a 14.04 specific work around that could cause upgrade problems. So at the moment the choice is to either (a) implement some code to transition users from 14.04, or (b) remove the 14.04 workaround and document that system service activation is not supported on that distro.

snapd portals testing:

  • I’ve been improving PR #6313, and it should be ready for review shortly. This adds spread test coverage for portal features running against the real xdg-desktop-portal with a stubbed out UI service. Since snap portal support is still in progress, the spread tests are set to only run on particular backends for now. The plan is to expand this list as we validate that things actually work.
  • The open/save test is functioning on the ubuntu-18.04 backend, but fail on 18.10. The xdg-document-portal service hits an assertion and crashes there. More info at bug 1810757, along with instructions to reproduce.
  • xdg-desktop-portal 1.0.3 (as found on 19.04) does not hit the assertion, so that’s something to keep in mind when we look at e.g. SRUing xdg-desktop-portal into 16.04.
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  • :christmas_tree: Vacation
  • :pager: Livepatch:
    • Proposed and uploaded (thanks @seb128) fix for LP: #1809505 ("‘Livepatch-Notif’ is always a zombie process after a system restart")
    • Reworked and proposed branch to update the online account dialog in software-properties-gtk
    • Implementing new livepatch tab in software-properties-gtk
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