Your message dated Mon, 04 May 2026 07:40:32 +0000
with message-id <[email protected]>
and subject line Bug#1135564: Removed package(s) from unstable
has caused the Debian Bug report #1051016,
regarding sawfish: please set XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP and use it to configure
xdg-desktop-portal
to be marked as done.
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--
1051016: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1051016
Debian Bug Tracking System
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--- Begin Message ---
Package: sawfish
Version: 1:1.11.90-1.2
Severity: normal
User: [email protected]
Usertags: portals.conf
As well as being available as a window manager to integrate into some
larger environment, Sawfish behaves like a very small desktop environment
in its own right, by providing a /usr/share/xsessions/sawfish.desktop
which can be selected on entry to a display manager such as lightdm.
If it's going to register as a desktop environment, then it should behave
like a desktop environment in other ways, such as choosing an
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP identifier.
xdg-desktop-portal 1.17.x introduces a new way to select which portals will
be used for which desktop environments, modelled on mimeapps.list:
- each desktop environment should provide a file like
/usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/sawfish-portals.conf
- the filename is ${DESKTOP}-portals.conf where ${DESKTOP} is the desktop
environment's entry in $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP (the same as the DesktopNames
from /usr/share/{x,wayland-}sessions/*.desktop), folded to lower case
- sysadmins and users can override this via files named portals.conf or
${DESKTOP}-portals.conf in various locations like /etc/xdg-desktop-portal
and ~/.config/xdg-desktop-portal
But as far as I can tell, Sawfish doesn't set XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP, so for
the purposes of this mechanism, it's not programmatically distinguishable
from any other desktop environment or window manager.
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP is also used in pre-existing freedesktop.org standards
like the OnlyShowIn/NotShowIn fields for .desktop files, and the ability to
provide a desktop-environment-specific mimeapps.list. Setting
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP would allow Sawfish to participate in those
specifications.
To reproduce
============
* Start from a basic non-GUI virtual machine (I used autopkgtest-build-qemu)
* Ensure that a user account exists
* apt install lightdm xorg sawfish
* reboot
* Log in as the user account, selecting "Sawfish" from the menu of
possible X11 sessions
* Open an xterm and run:
systemctl --user show-environment
(It's the systemd activation environment that matters here, more than
`env`, because xdg-desktop-portal will typically be run as a systemd
user service.)
Expected result
===============
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP should be set to a colon-separated sequence of
desktop environment names, most specific first. Sawfish seems to be its
own thing rather than being based on another desktop environment, so
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Sawfish
would seem appropriate.
This would allow the Sawfish session to have its own
desktop-environment-specific mimeapps.list or portals.conf(5), for
example /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/sawfish-portals.conf.
Actual result
=============
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP is unset.
This means that xdg-desktop-portal configuration can only be done via a
non-desktop-specific portals.conf, but that's not really something that a
non-opinionated distribution like Debian can usefully ship in a centralized
way, so each user of Sawfish who wants a working xdg-desktop-portal will
have to configure it themselves.
At the moment, this is mitigated by xdg-desktop-portal (>= 1.17) having
been patched to fall back to xdg-desktop-portal-gtk as a last-resort
desktop-environment-specific backend, but hard-coding that implementation
isn't really something we should be doing centrally (and the idea was
rejected upstream), so I intend to remove that patch before trixie
is released.
Suggested fix
=============
Add a sequence of semicolon-separated desktop environment names to
/usr/share/xsessions/sawfish.desktop, most likely just "Sawfish":
DesktopNames=Sawfish;
(For example, icewm and windowmaker use "ICEWM" and "WindowMaker" in
their equivalent xsessions file.)
And then create a /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/sawfish-portals.conf
with whatever portal backends are desired for an Sawfish session,
for example perhaps this:
[preferred]
default=gtk;
Please see portals.conf(5) or its source code
https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/blob/main/doc/portals-conf.rst
for full details.
Thanks,
smcv
--
This is part of a mass bug filing:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/08/msg00311.html
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
Version: 1:1.11.90-1.2+rm
Dear submitter,
as the package sawfish has just been removed from the Debian archive
unstable we hereby close the associated bug reports. We are sorry
that we couldn't deal with your issue properly.
For details on the removal, please see https://bugs.debian.org/1135564
The version of this package that was in Debian prior to this removal
can still be found using https://snapshot.debian.org/.
Please note that the changes have been done on the master archive and
will not propagate to any mirrors until the next dinstall run at the
earliest.
This message was generated automatically; if you believe that there is
a problem with it please contact the archive administrators by mailing
[email protected].
Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Thorsten Alteholz (the ftpmaster behind the curtain)
--- End Message ---
