Re: XDG standard desktop entries - desktop-file-utils and gtk, and KDE: mechanism of desktop database generation in profiles

[Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>]

Hi,

On Sun, 07 May 2017 17:35:46 -0700
Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is this supposed to work "out of the box" on foreign distros?

If you set the environment variables as documented yes - although some distros do weird things in their startup scripts if the environment variable is already set when they start up.

> I've noticed that when I install an application (e.g.,
> "cool-retro-term"), the application shows up via the "Search" feature of
> the "Application Overview" in GNOME3 on GuixSD [1], but not in Ubuntu
> via the Dash's search results [2].  In Ubuntu, I tried adding
> $HOME/.guix-profile/share to the XDG_DATA_DIRS, but even after
> rebooting, the Dash search still failed to find the application.

Strange.  I'd inspect /proc/<dash-pid>/environ whether it actually got the environment variable, and then attach via strace -p <dash-pid> to find out what desktop files it's reading...

> In Ubuntu, the application only showed up in the Dash search results
> after I manually copied the desktop entry for the application out of the
> store and put it into a well-known location, such as
> ~/.local/share/applications.

That should not be the case - sounds like a bug.  The question is where...