Monday 6th May 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: https://community.ubuntu.com/t/monday-29th-april-2019/10732
Next week’s notes are here: https://community.ubuntu.com/t/monday-13th-may-2019/10842

2 Likes
  • Fixed nvidia-detector from ubuntu-drivers.
  • Wrote a doc with possible improvements to Ubuntu desktop for owners of nVidia graphics cards.
  • ZFS: Writing test suite for GRUB menu generation.
2 Likes

Snaps:

  • Refreshed all the supported snaps for the libpng16 USN
  • Fixed iagno build failures, updated to 3.32 and use appstream
  • Tested gtk-common-themes with Yark-dark included with the snapd bug fix which is in beta now. Verified the fix is good.

Hyper-V image:

  • Worked with CPC team on finalizing livecd-rootfs changes before landing them

Roadmap planning with snapd, store, and advocacy teams.

1 Like
1 Like

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

:computer_mouse: Gnome Shell other work:

:beetle: Release bugs:

:house: Housekeeping:

  • Reinstalled my development system with 19.10 eoan.

:pick: Backlogs progress:

  • :chart_with_downwards_trend: Good news (falling backlogs): gdm3, xorg-server, xorg, thunderbird, chromium-browser, totem
  • :chart_with_upwards_trend: Bad news (consistently growing backlogs): ubiquity, grub2
2 Likes

Short week (4 days)

  • ZFS: Writing test suite for GRUB menu generation.

Misc:

  • Refreshed credentials for snap automation in Yaru/gtk-common-themes.
  • HR work
  • Debugged ubuntu-report FTBFS on eoan
  • Helped with confining GNOME Shell session without GDM
1 Like
  • ModemManager: Regression in 1.10 (the SRU for Bionic) got fixed upstream, posted debdiffs for updating the SRU with the fix. Waiting for upload/approval into -proposed.
  • cups-filters: Done the last steps of mentoring my GSoC 2018 student for him to finish the project of printer auto-selection in cups-browsed so that he has posted his pull request today (includes also: cups-browsed handles remote CUPS queues and native IPP printers equally; cups-browsed drops use of deprecated CUPS PPD APIs) and start into his first real job after the university next week.
  • cups-filters: Worked with one of this year’s students to make the pdftops filter output grayscale PostScript on grayscale jobs (before it was color with instructions to print in grayscale).
  • cups-filters: Started mentoring student to make pdftoraster not use undocumented Poppler APIs any more.
  • Google Summer of Code 2019: Today Google will officially announce the accepted student projects, meaning that students know for sure that they are accepted and have peace of mind starting on their projects.
  • Linux Plumbers Conference 2019 in Lisbon: Wrote proposal to apply for an OpenPrinting mini conference, phone meeting with organizers of Plumbers of the Linux Foundation.
  • Bugs.
1 Like

Week -1 day (labour day)

Mutter and Shell @ GNOME

Packaging stuff

  • Prepared mutter branch for eoan and disco [MP, merged] with fix to bug #1813716
  • Prepared new SRU for bionic (3 bugs fixed, updated) [MP, please sponsor]
  • Prepared eoan and disco gnome-shell with fix for bug 1809788 [MP eoan, MP disco, please sponsor]
  • Prepared bionic SRU for gnome-shell with 5 bug fixes [MP, please sponsor]

rls-:bug:'s

  • All the ones for bb are in progress, a part from the XUbuntuCancel one, delayed for next SRU
  • All the dd and ee are committed or released
4 Likes
  • reviewed/sponsored some xenial/GNOME SRUs for the oem team
  • HR work/discussions
  • had a look to the ucc/usd change to not use deprecated n-m libs, gave a +1 since it’s basically a backport of newer GNOME code
  • tested a gstreamer-vaapi fix from upstream (disco version renders video with green lines)
  • discussed a bit schedule with gstreamer’s upstream, the move to gitlab was an important part of the delay they had in the 1.15 cycle, hopefully a one time issue
  • debugged a libxkbcommon multiarch SRU regression, turned out to be due to binaries blocked in binNEW
  • quite some bugtriage, reported some issues upstream
  • HR reviews

firefox24 firefox

  • requested an update of rustc to 1.34 (and cargo to 0.35), required by firefox trunk/68
  • prepared update for 66.0.4+build3 to fix an upstream bug that disabled all installed extensions due to a signing certificate that expired on May 4th
    • thankfully, the issue was largely mitigated by Normandy, the upstream mechanism that allows Mozilla to roll out preference updates to the installed base
    • discussed with the security team whether Normandy should really be enabled by default in Ubuntu builds (yes, it should)

chromium22 chromium

  • updated stable to 74.0.3729.131
  • ongoing work on the deb to snap transition, largely inspired by similar work for the lxd package (currently rewriting the custom apport hook to extract and attach snap-relevant information to bug reports)

libreoffice24-margin libreoffice

1 Like

libreoffice24-margin libreoffice

:package: gnome build-snap

1 Like

I was off half of Thursday and Monday, so it was a short week.

  • Some sponsorships for Marco: gnome-shell, mutter, gnome-shell-extension-appindicator (eoan & disco, need to look at bionic next)
  • Got pinged by upstream on vte/gnome-terminal, updated those & SRUed
  • Helped debug a GDM issue with wayland -> xorg fallback. Had a bit of a discussion with upstream and I’ve been working on a hopefully more comprehensive solution - having sessions register themselves with GDM when they’ve started up properly.