Re: Relative paths in .desktop, .service files' Exec= lines
Simon McVittie <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.xdg.devel,gmane.comp.freedesktop.dbus |
|---|---|
| Organization | Collabora Ltd. |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On 23/06/16 19:28, Jasper St. Pierre wrote: > Uh, so this might be a dumb question, but how do relative paths help > relocatability? Install foobar into --prefix=/opt/stuff; add /opt/stuff/share to XDG_DATA_DIRS (or otherwise arrange for your desktop environment to search /opt/stuff/share/applications); now if /opt/stuff/share/applications/foobar.desktop says Exec=../../bin/foobar, launching it will start /opt/stuff/bin/foobar. The same applies to share/dbus-1/services, with an extra level of "../" to compensate for the extra level of nesting. (D-Bus on Windows actually replaces its own compile-time $prefix at runtime with wherever it has discovered it is actually installed, for example if you used --prefix=/mingw but installed it in C:\mingw32, it will look for service files in C:\mingw32/share/dbus-1/services, and interpret Exec=/mingw/bin/foobar as if it said C:\mingw32\bin/foobar - but I think that's really weird, and I don't advocate it for use on Unix.) > Doesn't resolving paths relative to the .desktop file mean that it is > intricately linked to the filesystem layout? The *relative* filesystem layout, yes, but the tree as a whole is relocatable. > This would break something like Alacarte, which, when you might want > to put an icon in another folder, copies it into > ~/.local/share/applications. Hmm, that's a good point; perhaps this is more generically useful for D-Bus .service files than it is for .desktop files. I was really hoping I could get the same syntax specified for both rather than randomly diverging, though. > This doesn't seem to help flatpak, which would have the .desktop file > hardlinked into the user's system at /usr/share/applications Actually /var/lib/flatpak/exports, but flatpak has to rewrite the .desktop file to have "Exec=flatpak run ..." anyway, so this isn't an extra burden for Flatpak. AIUI it's useful for Snap, which installs into arbitrary prefixes (and currently compensates by setting a massive number of environment variables), and possibly for AppImage, which mounts itself as a filesystem at an arbitrary prefix. -- Simon McVittie Collabora Ltd. <http://www.collabora.com/> _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg