ReText has wrong Exec and Icon lines in /usr/local/share/applications/me.mitya57.ReText.desktop file when installed with pip3

[N0rbert]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Have Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS or Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS installed with all updates
2. Install pip3 with sudo apt install python3-pip
3. Install ReText from pypi with sudo -H pip3 install retext

Expected results:

• pip3 installed ReText with correct paths in desktop-file - user can launch application from Dash and can identify ReText by its icon

Actual results:

• pip3 installed ReText with broken paths in /usr/local/share/applications/me.mitya57.ReText.desktop file:

  $ cat /usr/local/share/applications/me.mitya57.ReText.desktop | grep -E "Exec|Icon"
  Exec=ReText-7.0.4.data/scripts/retext %F
  Icon=ReText-7.0.4.data/data/share/retext/icons/retext.svg
  

  Screenshot from mozo Main Menu editor
  

• ReText starts normally only from terminal as

  $ which retext 
  /usr/local/bin/retext
  

  is correct.

Temporary workaround:

• Change paths in /usr/local/share/applications/me.mitya57.ReText.desktop manually to

  Exec=/usr/local/bin/retext
  Icon=/usr/local/share/retext/icons/retext.svg
  

[mitya57]

Thanks for reporting this! I will fix it ASAP. In the meantime, passing --no-cache-dir to pip should work around the issue.

Upd: the option name is --no-cache-dir, not --no-use-wheel like this comment previously stated.

[mitya57]

So it looks like by default pip first builds a wheel and then installs it. When installing into a wheel, our setup.py thinks that the wheel directory is the final destination and writes that path to the .desktop file. There is no way to know what the actual destination will be.

I have just pushed a commit that disables any path substitution at all when building wheels, so the desktop file will have generic Exec=retext %F and Icon=retext lines. This is not ideal, but better than the current situation.

I recommend either using the distro packages, or running pip with --no-cache-dir like my previous comment says.