easier start-command: expose applications

[Antoine Martin]

We can use ​python-xdg Menu to get the list of .desktop applications.
And inotify to watch for changes.
Then if the client supports it, we send the list of commands - and maybe inline a small version of the icon?

Then the start-command dialog can offer a menu.

(on mswindows, we could use ​Programmatically access All Users Start Menu, macos: not sure)

[Antoine Martin]

Done in r20699.

Still TODO:

• test from win32 and macos clients
• ideally, show the icon for each command using a CellRendererPixbuf, ie: ​http://python.zirael.org/e-gtk-combobox1.html

[Mark Harkin]

Really like this feature but think it could be more accessible from the main tray menu. What do you think?

Forgive my horrible Python coding but a quick example is here:
​https://github.com/mjharkin/Xpra/commit/63daf5a7e48f704bf0e8df0462c3d7fcad7b0f02

[Antoine Martin]

Updates:

• r20811 python3 compatibility
• r20813: forward icon data, add "start" tray menu, etc..

@mjharkin: is that good enough? I've renamed the menu entry to "start" amongst other changes.

Still TODO:

• some icons are missing - not sure why, especially for categories
• the cost of sending the icons can be high (hundreds of KB), so it might be worth using a dedicated packet for "xdg-data" to avoid slowing down the initial "hello" packet - could also be used with inotify to send updates when the menu data changes (ie: application added or removed)
• not sure we should keep the "start command" menu entry under server, it is mostly redundant now
• we could recycle it to add a "custom command" menu entry, maybe at the bottom of the category list?

[Mark Harkin]

I think start.png is missing from the r20813 commit.
I've the same issue with category icons.
Otherwise looks great.
Thanks.

[Antoine Martin]

• r20827 adds the missing icon
• r20826 tries harder to find icons for all the applications and categories (ugly and slow filesystem glob since pyxdg doesn't seem to want to find them..)

The only other change I would like to get in this release is the move to a separate "xdg-data" packet.

[Antoine Martin]

r20846 avoid errors with win32 clients: convert xpm icons to png server-side before sending.

[Antoine Martin]

code made more resilient in r20850: found some xpm icons that pillow could not load, we now log a warning and continue without.

[Antoine Martin]

• r20853: load xdg data in the background so we don't slow down the first connection by loading the menus synchronously then
• r20852: show which icon filename caused the error

[Mark Harkin]

With the changes for xpm load failure handling r20850, if the icon fails to load there is no menu item created. Could this be changed to load with a default icon or no icon?

Thanks.

[Antoine Martin]

mjharkin: try r20882, which should also fix the icon loading for tricky 'xpm' files: we now try loading with GTK first, and fallback to Pillow only if that fails. (and failures won't fail the whole desktop entry)

[Mark Harkin]

Looks good. Icons load correctly now.

Thanks.

[Mark Harkin]

XDG commands can also include %f %F %u %U placeholders.
(​https://portland.freedesktop.org/xdg-utils-1.1.0-rc1/scripts/html/xdg-desktop-menu.html)

I think it's best to remove them on the client side, incase we want to use them later on.

Something like this should fix the issue for now:

In gtk_tray_menu_base.py->make_applaunch_menu_item()

import re
...
command = re.sub('\%[fFuU]', '', command)

[Antoine Martin]

mjharkin: thanks, applied in r20913.
Yes, those could eventually be used to support "open with xyz on server".

[Antoine Martin]

Packaging fix for win32 in r20966.

[totaamwin32]

Some SVG icons must have text in them, because the win32 builds moan about fonts:

(Xpra:4056): Pango-WARNING **: couldn't load font "Bitstream Vera Sans Not-Rotated 11.7294921875", \
    falling back to "Sans Not-Rotated 11.7294921875", expect ugly output.

Avoid SVG? Convert to bitmap icons on the fly? Find a way to silence the warning?
Just ignore it?

Some relevant info: ​Pango unable to find fonts with librsvg

[Antoine Martin]

Let's ignore the warning since we can't silence it: ​https://stackoverflow.com/a/18955845/428751: I found out this is currently not possible and a known bug within either gobject-introspection or glib, since g_log_set_handler is not bindable, links to ​gobject-introspection: g_log_set_handler is not available

[migration script]

this ticket has been moved to: ​https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/issues/1961