wlr-foreign-toplevels pid

[damianatorrpm]

Below appears to affect all wayland compositors / environments (and X),
respectively any panel / dock that has the ability to pin an
application for quick
launching when all it's surfaces are closed.

wayland api provides the appId / title (IIRC this is the xdg-shell protocol)
X api provides the appId / title / icon
custom wayland wlroots protocol wlr-foreign-toplevel-management
provides the same

The implementation of all desktops environments face the following problem,
they need to match the appId to a desktop file to create a launcher,
which is done by looking up in all the directories $XDG_DATA_DIRS
until a desktop file matching the appId is found.

This is completely broken by design, especially in the times of
flatpak and snap.
As an example take $application, it can be installed

1. from system package - desktop file goes into /usr/share/applications/
2. from local build - desktop file goes into
   /usr/local/share/applications/
3. from flatpak(system wide) - desktop file goes into
   /var/lib/flatpak/share/applications/
4. from flatpak(user wide) - desktop file goes into
   $HOME/.local/share/applications/
5. from flatpak(custom loc) - desktop file goes into $custom
6. from snap - desktop file goes into snap directory

All of the above are exposed as $XDG_DATA_DIRS whatever application you pin
depends on the priority the lookup is done, very often it will not pin
the application it should!

A solution is to provide the PID and than being able to find the binary.
Consider adding the PID to wlr-foreign-toplevels

[emersion]

This is completely broken by design, especially in the times of
flatpak and snap.

The PID isn't a good solution because:

• It's racy
• Getting the executable path is system-dependent
• A launcher would still want to get metadata such as icon, category, etc that you can only retrieve from a .desktop file, the PID wouldn't help here

All of the above are exposed as $XDG_DATA_DIRS whatever application you pin
depends on the priority the lookup is done, very often it will not pin
the application it should!

What you describe sounds like a more general problem. I think you should open an issue in wayland-protocols to talk about this.

[damianatorrpm]

What you describe sounds like a more general problem. I think you should open an issue in wayland-protocols to talk about this.

I tried if you mean https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlr-protocols/-/issues
but I do not see the the new issuse/create issue button.

EDIT: found it
Additionally I have send this to wayland-devel under thread name

appId title / Iconic dock launchers

The suggestion was to use PID.

David Edmundson [email protected] | David Edmundson [email protected] | Sun, Apr 12, 3:13 PM (2 days ago) |
David Edmundson [email protected]
to me, wayland-devel | to me, wayland-devel
to me, wayland-devel

This may be a question for the general xdg mailing list.

All of the above are exposed as $XDG_DATA_DIRS whatever application you pin
depends on the priority the lookup is done, very often it will not pin
the application it should!

I wouldn't remotely call it "broken by design". There are legitimate
cases for overriding it's relatively common to override
firefox.desktop or whatever into your local paths so that you can
meddle with the environment. But semantically those do want to refer
to the same thing and explicitly not update every launcher.

Ultimately it comes down to if things should have different IDs they
should have different IDs. That's a client problem, not a wayland
problem. In KDE3 and KDE4 times we used to have an argument we passed
in to applications where we would pass the .desktop file name as an
argument which would then be used for the X11 startup notifications. I
think that's what would solve your problem best.

I imagine it could be possible additionally to appId and title to expose maybe the path to the actual binary?

You do have the pid from the client. From that you have the path to
the "actual binary" already.

[emersion]

Duplicate of #57