Re: Foreign distro Unity desktop broken after guix update

[Fredrik Salomonsson <plattfot@posteo.net>]

Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@freenet.de> writes:

> On Mon, 27 Dec 2021 22:17:22 +0100
> Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@freenet.de> wrote:
>
>> > env LD_DEBUG=libs LD_DEBUG_OUTPUT=/tmp/trace <executable>
>> 
>> Interesting, but I’m puzzled about how to use that with compiz/unity.
>
> I noticed that some icons in GNOME-applications are missing, so any of
> those might do in place of compiz. They all belong to Ubuntu, not guix.
>
> The result of `env LD_DEBUG=libs LD_DEBUG_OUTPUT=/tmp/trace
> gnome-calculator` told me that /gnu/store paths are checked first and
> exclusively for several libraries.
>
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH is empty and `env | grep /gnu/store` prints nothing,
> but env does contain
> ```
> GDK_PIXBUF_MODULE_FILE=/home/thorwil/.guix-profile/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache
> GIO_EXTRA_MODULES=/home/thorwil/.guix-profile/lib/gio/modules:/home/thorwil/.guix-profile/lib/gio/modules
> LIBRARY_PATH=/home/thorwil/.guix-profile/lib:/home/thorwil/.guix-profile/lib
> ```

Ok, GNOME probably have some other methods of dynamically load
libraries. The GDK_PIXBUF_MODULE_FILE looks suspicious. I'm
not familiar with GNOME and its tool kits. 

> I don’t recall ever doing anything about those; they are not defined
> in .profile or .bashrc.

They're defined in your guix profile. E.g I got GDK_PIXBUF_MODULE_FILE
defined in both

~/.guix-profile/etc/profile

and

~/.guix-home/profile/etc/profile

And as far as I can tell those gets added to the profile when another
package needs them.

> I added
> ```
> export GDK_PIXBUF_MODULE_FILE=/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache:/home/thorwil/.guix-profile/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache
> export LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib:/home/thorwil/.guix-profile/lib
> ```
> to .profile. Now I have all icons back! Guess there’s a better way?

Nice! I'm not sure there's a better way, other than having guix control
the full GNOME stack (which is probably not feasible or desirable on a
foreign distro).

> This is no longer looks like a guix-topic, but compiz still segfaults
> after many errors for various SVGs, like:
> ```
> ERROR 2021-12-28 10:50:18 nux.gltexture.resource.manager
> GLTextureResourceManager.cpp:54 Invalid target, impossible to generate
> a new texture. Impossible to generate a pixbuf: Couldn’t recognize the
> image file format for file “/usr/share/unity/icons/search_spin.svg”
> ```
>
> `file` and the image viewer eog have no problem with
> “/usr/share/unity/icons/search_spin.svg”.
>
> There’s also
> ```
> compiz[8431]: WARN  2021-12-28 10:50:15 unity.glib.dbus.server GLibDBusServer.cpp:595 Can't register object 'com.canonical.Unity.Dash' yet as we don't have a connection, waiting for it...
> compiz[8645]: WARN  2021-12-28 10:50:18 unity.glib.dbus.server GLibDBusServer.cpp:595 Can't register object 'com.canonical.Unity.Launcher' yet as we don't have a connection, waiting for it...
> ```

Yeah, this doesn't look like something caused by guix, might be a side
effect or something though. The last two warnings are about compiz not
being able to communicate with Dash and Launcher from Unity over dbus.
But I don't use either Ubuntu or Unity so sadly I cannot be much of a
help here.


-- 
s/Fred[re]+i[ck]+/Fredrik/g