Hi Brendan,

On Thu, 2 Aug 2018 16:21:02 +1000
Brendan Tildesley <brendan.tildesley@openmailbox.org> wrote:

> I've always had gvfs installed and it hasn't made any difference as far
> as I can tell

Hmm, what does your ~/.guix-profile/share/dbus-1/services directory contain?

What is the environment variable XDG_DATA_DIRS set to?

> Previously there was no $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS. 

Ok, then no dbus was running and that's bad for the clients of dbus.  They try
to autorun dbus in that case - but I've never seen that actually working :P

>After I modified slim
> to add dbus-launch, I have
> DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-Rc7AP3Xnzz,guid=97d26aba11773a9ce755829b5b611375

Okay, so now there's a session bus now.  Progress :)

> but it didn't fix the issue, and caused those weird errors. Actually I'm
> not getting those errors anymore, maybe due to reconfiguring and
> rebooting. 

Even more progress :)

>When I run `dbus-launch bash` , it overwrites that value with
> a new value in the current environment:
> unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-1vzMgxAURi,guid=98eb63bd2e22340a0c1d3bd85b6116d5

Yeah, as I said, now you have a tiny session even though you had a big session
already.  This isn't as useless as it sounds - it would make sense in containers
etc.

>  and then running pcmanfm/evince only from that bash shell works fine,
> running outside it or from dmenu doesn't.

If you are motivated, I suggest to try to proceed to get the version
without "dbus-launch bash" (but with slim configured to use dbus-launch)
to work.  It can't be missing much now.

I suspect that the gvfs service file is either not there, the environment
variable is not set or the executable mentioned inside the service file
is not found.

For better debugging, try:

youruser$ export DBUS_VERBOSE=1
youruser$ evince

And post the result here.