Notes on ebuilds with GUI

When this wiki page was started (2017-11-13), there was a lot confusion about how to write clean ebuilds for desktop applications. As result, there are many ebuilds which use obsolete eclasses, or even worse do not install, update and remove the icons and menus. The eclasses are hardly documented and the documentation has mistakes. Many for loops for icons miss the definition of the local variable.

Note
This page is still work in progress. It would be nice, if we could extract a howto wiki page from it afterwards and improve the documentation of the eclasses.

Eclasses

xdg.eclass

eclass reference: xdg.eclass

xdg inherits xdg-utils

xdg-utils.eclass

eclass reference: xdg-utils.eclass

gnome2.eclass

eclass reference: gnome2.eclass

gnome2-utils.eclass

eclass reference: gnome2-utils.eclass

kde5.eclass

eclass reference: kde5.eclass

kde5_pkg_preinst Function storing icon caches

kde5_pkg_postinst Function to rebuild the KDE System Configuration Cache after an application has been installed.

kde5_pkg_postrm Function to rebuild the KDE System Configuration Cache after an application has been removed.

fdo-mime.eclass (obsolete)

eclass reference: fdo-mime.eclass

fdo-mime is obsolete since 2017-06-19 see mail "[gentoo-dev] [PATCH] fdo-mime.eclass: Mark the eclass as deprecated".

How to fix ebuilds which still inherit fdo-mime?

emerge the ebuild
test with equery f, if files were installed in one of the special folders of the table on the bottom.
remove inherit fdo-mime
add the new eclasses accordingly to the table. Like inherit xdg-utils
if fdo-mime functions were substituted with the same xdg-utils functions no revision bump is required. Else make a revision bump.
test with repoman

What repoman QA can detect

CODE

* QA Notice: .desktop files with MimeType= were found installed
 * but desktop mimeinfo cache has not been updated:
 *   /usr/share/applications/SciTE.desktop
 * Please make sure to call xdg_desktop_database_update()
 * in pkg_postinst() and pkg_postrm() phases of appropriate pkgs.

Code examples to create icons

CODE

src_install() {
    local i
    for i in 16x16 22x22 32x32 48x48 64x64 128x128; do
        newicon -s ${i} utilities/${PN}${i}.png ${PN}.png
    done
}

.desktop files

.desktop_files

brainstorming section (delete later, when merged in the text)

This page provides a summary of various files whose installation should be accompanied by appropriate postinst/postrm trigger calls.

Path	Conditions	preinst	prerm	postrm	postinst
xdg-utils.eclass (or automatic in xdg.eclass)
/usr/share/applications	if MimeType= is specified	-	-	xdg_desktop_database_update	xdg_desktop_database_update
/usr/share/mime		-	-	xdg_mimeinfo_database_update	xdg_mimeinfo_database_update
gnome2-utils.eclass (or automatic in gnome2.eclass)
/etc/gconf/schemas/		gnome2_gconf_savelist	-	-	gnome2_gconf_install
/usr/share/icons		gnome2_icon_savelist (*1)	-	gnome2_icon_cache_update	gnome2_icon_cache_update
/usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas		gnome2_schemas_savelist	-	gnome2_schemas_update	gnome2_schemas_update
/usr/share/omf		gnome2_scrollkeeper_savelist	-	gnome2_scrollkeeper_update	gnome2_scrollkeeper_update
/usr/lib*/gdk-pixbuf-2.0		gnome2_gdk_pixbuf_savelist	-	-	gnome2_gdk_pixbuf_update
/usr/lib*/gio/modules		-	-	gnome2_giomodule_cache_update	gnome2_giomodule_cache_update

*1) Not needed in general, but still useful to use in phase defining eclasses, like gnome2.eclass.

Needs to be updated since some savelists are not needed
what about fonts?

Working principle of a trigger in bash

CODE

while read type file; do
	case "${file}" in
		/usr/share/ca-certificates/*.crt)
			update-ca-certificates
			break
		;;
	esac
done < "${TEMP}/files"

portage generates the QA warnings here: https://github.com/gentoo/portage/tree/master/bin/postinst-qa-check.d

Future_EAPI/Triggers