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.
bionic: I finally reproduced the crash this week and found an old patch which resolved it in 3.30 onward (which is why we only see the crash in 3.28/bionic). Fix branch from Marco awaiting review.
Housekeeping:
Reinstalled my development system with 19.10 eoan.
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.
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.
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
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)
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)
libreoffice
mentoring @marcustomlinson and sponsoring his uploads (6.2.3 SRU to disco)
talked to doko to confirm that the java vendor patches need to be SRUed to both bionic and xenial
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.