Missing icon & `.desktop` files

[fkobi]

Hello,

I have put some work into Gentoo's BiglyBT packaging efforts.
As you might know, Gentoo is a source-based distribution and to so far we have been getting by with the automated gzip tarballs.

Today however I have noticed the GitHub_BiglyBT_unix.tar.gz distfile.
It has the dektop and icon files.
Also in our packaging we are deleting development artifacts (ex. .editorconfigs) manually.

That made me realize that it would be the the best if there could be another tarball, maybe xzd that would make our life easier.
What do you think about it?

I would create it myself but I do not know how.

[TuxPaper]

Forgive me for not knowing much about Gentoo packaging. Are you asking a release tarball of the source, packaged with with the desktop and icon files?

Or would having the desktop icons be added to github (we've contemplated creating an /assets folder in previous issues) be sufficient?

[fkobi]

Adding assets/ would make it possible to ship them for us as right now we make our own desktop file and have no images.

However making a distfile designed for source-based distros would be even better because besides containing the now missing files it would

• use better compression than gzip
  • tarball compressed with xz is ~11MB (>25%) smaller
• have development files removed

I'll try to have someone more knowledgable than me on packaging Java to voice their opinion.
It's possible that more improvements could be made.

EDIT: After a brief discussion with our Java team (that I am not a part of) I have decided to change the issue title to point to the problem and not one of the the suggested solutions.

[parg]

Does

https://github.com/BiglySoftware/BiglyBT/tree/master/assets/linux

work for you?

[fkobi]

Those are great!
I do not think the scripts will be of much use for Gentoo but the files are exactly what we needed.

[fkobi]

I have closed this as the current situation is good enough I think it still can be improved:
the icons can be moved to just assets/ as they are OS-agnostic.

[sergiomb2]

Hi, biglybt.desktop contains the entry installer:dir.main.
In biglybt.desktop [1], how is ${installer:dir.main} supposed to be replaced?
I’d like to package BiglyBT as an RPM for Linux (Red Hat, Fedora, or openSUSE), and I’d like to know how to substitute this variable, or if there is a standard way to handle such variables.

[1]
5:Exec=${installer:dir.main}/biglybt %U
6:Icon=${installer:dir.main}/biglybt.svg

[sergiomb2]

@fkobi , @TuxPaper

[fkobi]

The ${} syntax suggests that it is a shell variable but I do not know how to use it that way.
@TuxPaper could you please explain that?

I’d like to package...

Nice!
I often find it useful to see how other independent distros do it. Gentoo and Arch just sed it and I am not certain how Debian does it:

• https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/net-p2p/biglybt/biglybt-3.9.0.0-r1.ebuild#n110
• https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=biglybt#n48
• https://salsa.debian.org/java-team/biglybt/-/blob/master/assets/linux/biglybt.desktop?ref_type=heads

[sergiomb2]

aur do this sed -i -e "s|Exec=.*|Exec=$pkgname %U|" -e "s|Icon=.*|Icon=$pkgname|" $pkgname.desktop
debian have his own https://salsa.debian.org/java-team/biglybt/-/blob/master/debian/biglybt.desktop?ref_type=heads
gentoo also hack desktop

	# patch the desktop file
	sed -i \
		-e '/#!/d' \
		-e 's|${installer:dir.main}/||' \
		-e 's|.svg||' \
		"${ASSET_DIR}"/${PN}.desktop || die "patching desktop file failed"

	# https://github.com/BiglySoftware/BiglyBT/pull/3523
	sed -i 's/Application;//g' "${ASSET_DIR}"/${PN}.desktop || die

[fkobi]

None of the 3 mentioned distros use the shell variable. Does it make sense to have it then?
@ebourg

I think Debian maintainers should seriously consider using the upstream file now: they have added their own years ago when Bigly did not have one.

[ebourg]

Thank you for the update, I'll get a look.

[sergiomb2]

So I propose PR #3657 equivalent to the solution used in Gentoo Linux, with the addition of Keywords=file transfer;P2P;