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bug: taffybar should enable status-notifier-watcher by default (fails on first start without it)

Open cumber opened this issue 2 years ago • 1 comments

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Issue description

I'm not 100% sure if this is really a bug or a feature request here, but:

I think we can improve the UX by having services.status-notifier-watcher .enable default to true if services.taffybar.enable is true.

I had been using taffybar and nm-applet together for a long time, using a manual startup script. I've been gradually migrating things out of my manual script into services configured by Home Manager, and noticed both taffybar and nm-applet had existing modules, so I tried switching those on. The problem I had was that the network widget would never appear in the tray, unless I killed my session and logged in a second time after each boot.

I noticed that the journal always showed taffybar fail with this error:

 taffybar[1412]: taffybar: user error (Pattern match failure in do expression at src/System/Taffybar/Widget/SNITray.hs:79:3-11)

Systemd would then immediately restart taffybar and there would be no error the second time. This error would only happen on the first session after boot. I think that nm-applet was being started by systemd after the first invocation of taffybar but before the restart, and it never hooked up properly with taffybar's tray watcher.

Anyway, I was getting all ready to file a bug on taffybar, but looking for related bugs there led me to find that it is recommended to start status-notifier-watcher before taffybar, rather than rely on taffybar's ability to start a watcher by itself. I then noticed that Home Manager also has services.status-notifier-watcher (configured so that systemd will start it before taffybar). I tried enabling that service too, and the first-startup error in taffybar stopped happening (and nm-applet appears in the tree on first session after boot).

So, is it possible to make services.taffybar.enable = true imply status-notifier-watcher.enable = true by default? I would submit a pull request but I'm pretty green with writing nixos modules, not sure how to do the conditional default depending on another module (I would like to see how that's done, actually).

Maintainer CC

@pltanton @rycee

System information

- system: `"x86_64-linux"`
 - host os: `Linux 5.15.49, NixOS, 22.11 (Raccoon), 22.11.20220626.f2537a5`
 - multi-user?: `yes`
 - sandbox: `yes`
 - version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.9.1`
 - channels(root): `"nixos-21.03pre249162.1dc37370c48"`
 - nixpkgs: `/nix/store/1qz0d0cx49ic26jynvb6fqmzl138rj0s-source`

cumber avatar Jul 11 '22 04:07 cumber

Actually I see from https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/pull/314 that it was decided that status-notifier-watcher shouldn't be a dependency of taffybar, even by default. Maybe we should add an option to taffybar so people can discover it from there? Or even just a note in the description of taffybar that you might want to enable status-notifier-watcher as well?

cumber avatar Jul 11 '22 04:07 cumber

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stale[bot] avatar Oct 09 '22 05:10 stale[bot]