pantheon.wingpannel-applications-menu: applications not reloaded when installed

[kirelagin]

Describe the bug

When I install a desktop app into my profile, it does not appear in the "Applications" menu automatically.

To Reproduce

1. Use Pantheon.
2. Install some desktop app using nix profile install.
3. Try to find it in the "Applications" menu.

Expected behavior
It is there.

Notify maintainers
@worldofpeace

Maintainer information:

# a list of nixpkgs attributes affected by the problem
attribute:
  - pantheon.wingpanel-applications-menu
module:

---

My understanding is that there is code in the indicator that collects applications subdirs from XDG_DATA_DIRS, reads the files from them and then sets up a FileMonitor for each directory. However, in the case of a NixOS profile, the directory itself, naturally, never changes, so it needs to also monitor all directories on the way to the root.

That's not really a Nixpkgs issue, but something that needs to be fixed upstream, however, I'm pretty sure they will be not particularly impressed by our use-case, so I'm opening an issue here. I do hope they will accept a PR, even if useful only for us.

[kirelagin]

(Correction: and not only monitor each directory, but also resolve all symlinks and monitor each symlink individually. E.g. in this specific case the directory in question is $HOME/.nix-profile/share/applications, however to catch the change one needs to realise that $HOME/.nixp-profile is a symlink, which points to another symlink(2), which points to something useful; and the event we are interested in is the change of symlink(2).)

[worldofpeace]

Hi @kirelagin, thanks for your report. I actually have also noticed this came to identical conclusions, it's just I forgot to report it (I think). It's also not just using nix profile nix-env, but also if you used systemPackages. I can't remember if it was a change needed in applications-menu, or if it was lower down... Regardless of that I'm a member of Pantheon upstream and they're very responsive to the patches I make.

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info