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

From: Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:29:42 +0900

Hi,

Csepp <[email-masked]> writes:

> Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]> 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.

I think it may be that Sway will only honor ~/.profile and not
~/.bash_profile, or something like this?

I think the right approach here could be a home service as Liliana
suggested, to automated the required configuration.  I wouldn't like to
have to maintain this in Guix itself since flatpak is not a standard
component of it, and it seems being opt-in would be less surprising.

The same way GNOME on other systems doesn't recognize Guix installed
applications without you configuring your session files accordingly.

I'll now close this.  A guix home "service" patch would be welcome
though.

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim