.desktop points to wrong path when installed from source

[hyOzd]

This is the contents of the mailnag.desktop file when installed from source:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Mailnag
Comment=An extensible mail notification daemon
Comment[de]=Ein erweiterbarer Mail-Benachrichtigungs-Dämon
Exec=/usr/bin/mailnag --quiet
Icon=mailnag
Type=Application
NoDisplay=true
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
X-GNOME-UsesNotifications=true

But mailnag executables are in /usr/local/bin

>>> which mailnag; which mailnag-config 
/usr/local/bin/mailnag
/usr/local/bin/mailnag-config

Due to this problem, when installed from source, shortcuts doesn't appear in menus.

[hyOzd]

By the way I've spent some time on this issue; trying to find out the "final and true installation path of the executables from a setup.py script".

I think I found something;

install_script_cmd = self.distribution.get_command_obj('install_scripts')
print(install_script_cmd.install_dir)

When called from inside InstallData.run() function this will print the installation directory of the executables.

I hope it's useful to you.

[hyOzd]

I've noticed this problem isn't limited to .desktop files. Plugins were not loaded because paths in the dist_cfg.py were wrong. For ex;

LIB_DIR = '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/Mailnag'

should have been;

LIB_DIR = '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/Mailnag'

Manually specifying --prefix during install solved these issues;

sudo python ./setup.py install --prefix=/usr/local

[pulb]

When running setup.py install the prefix defaults to /usr on my system and PREFIX = '/usr' at line 23 in setup.py does match in that case. It seems that for some reason the prefix defaults to /usr/local on your distro so PREFIX = '/usr' doesn't match here. The current prefix code is implemented hacky anyway (as the comment in line 22 says ;), I'll try to reimplement it based on your install_script findings.

You don't need to install mailnag from source btw, you can just run it from an arbitrary directory in your home dir, in parallel to your package installation.

[hyOzd]

For the record; my distro is Linux Mint 17 (ubuntu based version).

Thanks for the tip.

[pulb]

More info on this topic: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2009-September/013284.html https://docs.python.org/2/install/