Your message dated Sun, 07 Dec 2025 08:23:02 +0000
with message-id <[email protected]>
and subject line Bug#1051020: fixed in subtle 0.11.3224-xi-3
has caused the Debian Bug report #1051020,
regarding subtle: please set XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP and use it to configure
xdg-desktop-portal
to be marked as done.
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--
1051020: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1051020
Debian Bug Tracking System
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--- Begin Message ---
Package: subtle
Version: 0.11.3224-xi-2.2+b8
Severity: normal
User: [email protected]
Usertags: portals.conf
As well as being available as a window manager to integrate into some
larger environment, subtle behaves like a very small desktop environment
in its own right, by providing a /usr/share/xsessions/subtle.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/subtle-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, subtle 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 subtle 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 subtle
* reboot
* Log in as the user account, selecting "subtle" 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. subtle seems to be its
own thing rather than being based on another desktop environment, so
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=subtle
would seem appropriate.
This would allow the subtle session to have its own
desktop-environment-specific mimeapps.list or portals.conf(5), for
example /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/subtle-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 subtle 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/subtle.desktop, most likely just "subtle":
DesktopNames=subtle;
(For example, icewm and windowmaker use "ICEWM" and "WindowMaker" in
their equivalent xsessions file.)
And then create a /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/subtle-portals.conf
with whatever portal backends are desired for a subtle 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 ---
Source: subtle
Source-Version: 0.11.3224-xi-3
Done: Andreas Tille <[email protected]>
We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
subtle, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.
A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.
Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed. If you
have further comments please address them to [email protected],
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.
Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Andreas Tille <[email protected]> (supplier of updated subtle package)
(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing [email protected])
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512
Format: 1.8
Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2025 08:17:41 +0100
Source: subtle
Architecture: source
Version: 0.11.3224-xi-3
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Debian QA Group <[email protected]>
Changed-By: Andreas Tille <[email protected]>
Closes: 1051020 1120169
Changes:
subtle (0.11.3224-xi-3) unstable; urgency=medium
.
* QA upload.
Closes: #1120169
* Secure URI and more precise Homepage
* Add watch file
* d/rules: Not an example
* d/copyright: Update Format, secure URIs
* Standards-Version: 4.7.2 (routine-update)
* debhelper-compat 13 (routine-update)
* Remove trailing whitespace in debian/changelog (routine-update)
* Use secure URI in Vcs control header Vcs-Browser.
* Remove deprecated Encoding key from desktop file debian/subtle.desktop.
* Set XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP and use it to configure xdg-desktop-portal
Closes: #1051020
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