Variety doesn't start in Debian "Jessie" with MATE desktop

[Roberto Suarez]

It seems that the deb package of Variety 0.5.3 doesn't work by default in Debian "Jessie", using MATE 1.8.1. From what I've gathered from a "-vv" log and a strace of variety (both attached), it's a problem with paths: variety looks for all its components, and also some common libraries and files (like gsettings schemas) in directories under /opt/extras.ubuntu.com/variety, instead of /usr/share, /usr/lib and so on.

Maybe it's something weird on my installation, but it shouldn't be because I've just reinstalled a week ago, with nothing fancy.

Thanks in advance!

[Roberto Suarez (robe-allenta)]

Forgot to add the strace log. Here it is.

[Roberto Suarez (robe-allenta)]

I think I found how to fix this, though I don't know why :-)

The problem is this line in /opt/extras.ubuntu.com/variety/bin/variety:

    os.putenv("XDG_DATA_DIRS", "%s:%s" % ("/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/variety/share/", os.getenv("XDG_DATA_DIRS", "")))

It seems it messes up with how Python (maybe PyGTK, in particular) searches for shared libraries and icons. Maybe it works in Ubuntu, but not in Debian. Removing it fixes the problem: variety starts and works as expected.

I attach a patch for debian/rules, a simple comment of the command that adds the problematic line. I don't know why it was there, so maybe I'm breaking something else. Please, check that this is not the case and let me know.

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

Thanks, Roberto. As it is now, Variety is packaged for installation as an Ubuntu "extra" and this type of package is posted to the PPA. This is a legacy from the way Variety started as a project in the beginning, as part of an Ubuntu-specific competition.
One of the next official releases will change this, and Variety will be packaged in the standard Debian way, so this bug will become obsolete (hopefully...).

As it is now, the debian rules file is autogenerated as part of the build process (with a tool called Quickly), so there is no use of changing it directly.

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

I've committed the changes necessary to move to standard Debian packaging and it will be in effect on next release.
The new rules file is much simpler now and shouldn't cause such problems:

#!/usr/bin/make -f
%:
ifneq ($(shell dh -l | grep -xF translations),)
 dh $@ --with python2,translations
else
 dh $@ --with python2
endif