[Nix-dev] packaging razor-qt, how to deal with /etc/xdg/ and such

[Vladimír Čunát]

On 02/18/2013 10:50 PM, Bjørn Forsman wrote:
> I'm trying to build razor-qt (a small desktop environment written in
> Qt) for nix. I quickly bumped into issues during the install phase:
> razor-qt tries to write stuff to /etc/xdg/{menus,autostart,razor} and
> /usr/share/{xsession,apps/kdm/sessions}. And that doesn't go well on
> NixOS. Any suggestions on how to handle packages that adheres to the
> XDG standard like that (and those (x)session paths?). Is there a way
> to patch it that is (probably) acceptable upstream?
>
> Yesterday I did a quick patch (to replace those absolute paths with
> variables) and sent a pull request to razor-qt devs[1]. But apparently
> it is not that simple. So now I'm trying to read up on the XDG basedir
> and autostart specification and wondering how it all fits into NixOS.
> Any hints (or code!) appreciated :-)

It is sure that all these files *have to* go somewhere into $out. Some 
packages need to be patched to force them and upstream may not 
understand our reasons (we don't comply LSB, etc.).

I believe we're putting this stuff in $out/etc/xdg currently (Xfce 
packages do). However, I don't know how much these get used (and for 
example gtk icon cache is currently only generated for NixOS 
environmentPackages and not user's env).

IMHO you're going to use much of these paths only for the session code 
in the corresponding NixOS module.

Vlada


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