Reform-desktop-help error

MNT Reform
1

I’ve observed something on my MNT Reform2 after the most recent OS updates which has me scratching my head somewhat.

After booting up my system and starting the sway window manager, the first terminal which opens by default prints the message:

bash: line 1: reform-desktop-help: command not found

The only file reform-desktop-help I could find on my system is in /etc and it’s simply a text file (not a script).

$ ls -la /etc/reform-desktop-help
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1111 Sep 28  2023 /etc/reform-desktop-help

This file seems to be part of the reform-tools package:

$ dpkg -S /etc/reform-desktop-help
reform-tools: /etc/reform-desktop-help

A big more digging revealed that there exists /etc/reform-help, as well as a script /usr/bin/reform-help. I’m not sure if I’m missing for example /usr/bin/reform-desktop-help?

At any rate, I couldn’t find reform-desktop-help being called in the .bashrc, etc. So this has me scratching my head somewhat. It’s likely being invoked as part of some sway startup, which is eluding me at the moment.

In terms of OS release, I have the following:

$ uname -a
Linux reform 6.11.2-mnt-reform-arm64 #1 SMP Debian 6.11.2-1+reform20241016T122429Z (2024-10-16) aarch64 GNU/Linux

$ cat /etc/os-release 
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux trixie/sid"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_CODENAME=trixie
ID=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"

And …

/etc/motd shows: System Image v4: 2023-12-25

1 Like
2

Thank you for your great bug report!

So, the reform-tools package indeed used to ship a script /usr/bin/reform-desktop-help and all it did was:

#!/bin/sh
exec cat /etc/motd /etc/reform-desktop-help /etc/reform-help

The only script calling this tool was /usr/libexec/reform-tools/reform-tray.py.

I changed this in reform-tools 1.46 in which I added the --desktop function to the reform-help tool, making it take over the functionality of reform-desktop-help. Naturally, /usr/libexec/reform-tools/reform-tray.py was changed to call reform-help --desktop instead of reform-desktop-help.

But now that you bring this up, I’m going through old commits in the reform-tools git and I found that in the very beginning, that is in version 1.1 of reform-tools, the default ~/.config/sway/config had the following line in it:

exec xfce4-terminal -e 'bash -c "reform-desktop-help; bash"'

That line will automatically open a new xfce4-terminal every time sway starts. That then changed in reform-tools commit fd2fec54822a31f0c692ba6f0b022a070fe9055e which switched from xfce4-terminal to foot but was still calling reform-desktop-help. The functionality of opening a new terminal window when sway starts was then finally killed with commit f9f9673298ff8cfb227758bd304f8ca3f957027b which included the call to reform-desktop-help into /usr/libexec/reform-tools/reform-tray.py.

So, if your system image is older than “Tue Apr 16 16:50:22 2024” or in other words, if your system image was made with reform-tools version 1.38 or earlier, then it will have a sway config which starts a new terminal and that terminal will run reform-desktop-help as the first thing.

I now wonder how to best handle this… Should I add a reform-desktop-help script back into $PATH to not break user’s existing setup? Or should I add a new message to reform-check which instructs users to replace reform-desktop-help with reform-help --desktop or remove the line altogether from their ~/.config/sway/config… hrm… :thinking:

3

I now wonder how to best handle this… Should I add a reform-desktop-help script back into $PATH to not break user’s existing setup?

Could add the reform-desktop-help back into $PATH and have it only print a warning that this is deprecated and users should remove it from the sway config.

4

@josch Thank you! I was wondering if there was something wrong with my installation (or if I was losing my mind).

For now, I simply updated ~/.config/sway/config and replaced reform-desktop-help with reform-help --desktop.

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