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.

Eclasses

How to fix ebuilds which still inherit fdo-mime?

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

What repoman QA can detect

* 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

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

.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.

• *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?

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