Ubuntu
gnome-session package

Missing autostart directory

Bug #622919 reported by Gunnar Hjalmarsson
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
gnome-session (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

When I installed a program, that is supposed to be launched at startup, by building it from source using prefix=/usr/local, its .desktop file ended up in /usr/local/etc/xdg/autostart, which seems correct as far as I can tell. However, the program was still not launched automatically.

Even if I fixed the problem with a symlink from ~/.config/autostart, I suspect that /usr/local/etc/xdg/autostart ought to be included in the list of directories that are searched for .desktop files.

I'm using Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS.

Revision history for this message
David Sugar (dyfet-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

I am looking at:

http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

The "plural" use of "$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS" suggests maybe multiple directories can be specified for /etc/xdg, but the specification does not itself come out and say so, as it does clearly in the case of "$XDG_DATA_DIRS". So it may be possible to set XDG_CONFIG_DIRS to multiple paths. You can also change this using the ~/.profile of your current user account to directly set XDG_CONFIG_DIRS.

Revision history for this message
Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj) wrote :

This is the contents of $PATH on my Ubuntu:
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games

The fact that the first two directories are /usr/local/* ditto indicates that Ubuntu acknowledges the convention to use the prefix /usr/local when building and installing software from source, in order to keep it separated from package distributed software provided by the system. To be consistent and prevent problems like the one I described above, I believe that the Ubuntu configuration ought to include /usr/local/etc/xdg when setting $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS. I agree with David that nothing in the specification contradicts with that conclusion.

Shimi Chen (shimi-chen)
affects: ubuntu → gnome-session (Ubuntu)
Revision history for this message
Pedro Villavicencio (pedro) wrote :

Thanks for the report, it has been some time without any response or feedback in this bug report and we are wondering if this is still an issue for you with the latest release of Ubuntu the Natty Narwhal, May you please test with that version and comment back if you're still having or not the issue? Please have a look at http://www.ubuntu.com/download to know how to install that version. Thanks in advance and sorry for the late response.

Changed in gnome-session (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj) wrote :

[gunnar@gunnar-laptop ~]$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 11.04 \n \l

[gunnar@gunnar-laptop ~]$ echo $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS
/etc/xdg/xdg-gnome-classic:/etc/xdg

So the issue still exists.

Changed in gnome-session (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → Confirmed
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