Fedora 30: RPD installed and working, but not sowing up in application menu

Software Rapid Photo Downloader
1

Hi,

I installed RPD 0.9.14 using the script on my Fedora 30 brand new setup (fresh install), and everything went fine, except that RPD is not showing up as an application in the Gnome Shell menu. I can run RPD from the command line in .local/bin. I also see the net.damonlynch.rapid-photo-downloader.desktop file in ./local/share/application.

For some reasons, it seems that .local/bin is not in the system path, so issuing the command rapid-photo-downloader is only working from this specific directory

Any help?

Thanks.

2

Have you rebooted? Logging out and logging in again might work too.

3

I’ve just noticed that ~/.local/bin is not the default path on my instance of Ubuntu 19.04, which uses a /home partition from previous distro releases. I hope this is not a case of Gnome developers disabling ~/.local/bin or something similarly drastic. The solution for now is to add ~/.local/bin to the PATH.

1 Like
4

I confirm that adding ~/.local/bin to the path solved the problem. (Rebooting/relogging was not working)

Thanks for helping… and thanks for this really great and useful app!

p.s. I guess that there’s a good reason and I do appreciate your current work for sure, but wouldn’t it be more efficient to provide a snap/flatpak package instead of an install script?

5

More efficient for who? :smile:

Isn’t it in the Fedora repos as rapid-photo-downloader?

6

The problem is that the RPD version in the Fedora repository is (was) quite outdated, i.e. 0.4 (actually, there are some missing dependencies, so it’s not even installable), so the only option for now it to install via a script.

I understand that there’s a lot of work involved in an application like RPD, so I don’t want to sound like I’m asking for more… I was just wondering what’s the advantage of maintaining an install script (which is not that easy on the long run, in order to keep up with various distros change) over a flatpak or snap (or even appimage) package… Probably not that easy to maintain these packages…

7

Ive been looking at what it’d take to make a flapak for RPD. It doesn’t seem like it’d be too hard.

8

In all honesty, I have no time to work on packaging because I need to finish my PhD dissertation and then find some kind of employment.

Packaging can be a lot of work and it’s easy to screw up. It’s certainly time-consuming to make a package. Something invariably goes wrong that’s not covered in the documentation or is due to a bug in the package implementation.

Regarding Flatpak if they don’t have an equivalent to a snap “classic” (i.e. non-confined) mode, I wouldn’t bother, as by its very nature Rapid Photo Downloader should not be confined. But hey if it does and someone wants to construct one, that would be a great service.