bug#56567: [BUG] Gnome doesn't recognize applications path for flatpak

bug#56567: [BUG] Gnome doesn't recognize applications path for flatpak

[Liliana Marie Prikler]

Am Freitag, dem 15.07.2022 um 01:07 +0000 schrieb Jacob Hrbek:
> Steps to reproduce:
> 1. Install any flatpak app from a GNOME environment
> 2. Try to launch the app from activities  (the gnome menu accessible 
> through super-key) and expect it to not find it
> 
> To fix this i was told that the path 
> `~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share/applications` has to be
> appended in the environmental variable XDG_DATA_DIRS
Then why don't you simply do so?  Unlike certain distributions *cough*
Ubuntu *cough*, Guix System depends on neither Flatpak nor Snap to
offer "containerized" applications.  This configuration is thus yours
to make.  If your problem is that there's no Guix Home service to do
so, then fair enough, but assuming a regularly managed bash_profile,
that line should be easy enough to add (and more importantly how to add
it should be documented by Flatpak – if not, that's their issue).

bug#56567: [BUG] Gnome doesn't recognize applications path for flatpak

[Liliana Marie Prikler]

Am Sonntag, dem 17.07.2022 um 06:03 +0000 schrieb Jacob Hrbek:
> Why is making a user configuration saner in comparison to making it
> work out of the box?
Because in this instance "making it work out of the box" entails
statefulness that most Guix users would typically like to avoid.  Plus,
we are not talking about a very complicated setup here, it's one line
of shell code to drop into your .bash_profile or similar:

export
$XDG_DATA_DIRS="$HOME/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share:$XDG_DATA_DIRS
"

Now granted, if you wanted to account for the fact that XDG_DATA_DIRS
could be empty on some systems (some foreign distros rely on the
implicit default), then you'd have to code around that, but that's
again not within the scope of Guix System.

bug#56567: [BUG] Gnome doesn't recognize applications path for flatpak

[Csepp]

Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler@ist.tugraz.at> writes:

> Am Sonntag, dem 17.07.2022 um 06:03 +0000 schrieb Jacob Hrbek:
>> Why is making a user configuration saner in comparison to making it
>> work out of the box?
> Because in this instance "making it work out of the box" entails
> statefulness that most Guix users would typically like to avoid.  Plus,
> we are not talking about a very complicated setup here, it's one line
> of shell code to drop into your .bash_profile or similar:
>
> export
> $XDG_DATA_DIRS="$HOME/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share:$XDG_DATA_DIRS
> "
>
> Now granted, if you wanted to account for the fact that XDG_DATA_DIRS
> could be empty on some systems (some foreign distros rely on the
> implicit default), then you'd have to code around that, but that's
> again not within the scope of Guix System.

Since I am running into this same issue on Sway, *even though* I added
that line to my Zsh profile, I don't think the user config route is the
right one to recommend.
Editing environment variables certainly *seems* easy, but I consider
myself fairly adept at Linux and I could not tell you in what order they
are loaded, and clearly it matters, since j4-dmenu-desktop gets the
wrong variables when launched from Sway, but the right ones when
launched from a terminal.  Even though Sway was also run from a
terminal, via dbus-run-session.
So clearly there are a lot of moving parts, and a regular user who just
wants desktop apps to work should not be expected to manually edit these
files.