Some core commands still rely on Zenity to display error messages, but Zenity is no longer installed in dom0 by default

[andrewdavidwong]

Reported by Peter Funk on qubes-users:

While playing around with a freshly installed Qubes-OS 4.1.0 I discovered by accident that there are a few core commands which make still use of the utility program zenity to display error messages but the package zenity is not installed in dom0 by default. For me the fix was easy::

sudo qubes-dom0-update zenity

I added the missing tool. Out of curiosity I had a look into the sources and found at least three places which make use of zenity::

  $ grep -rn zenity .
  ./qubes-core-admin-linux/file-copy-vm/qfile-dom0-agent.c:23:#define ZENITY_CMD "zenity --title 'File copy/move error' --warning --text "
  ./qubes-core-admin-linux/dom0-updates/qubes-dom0-update:187:            zenity --error --text "$message1\n$message2"
  ./qubes-core-admin-linux/dom0-updates/qubes-dom0-update:334:        zenity --info --title='Dom0 updates' --text='No updates available'

So since kdialog is also not installed by default I believe this could be considered as a bug in the default package selection.

Either zenity should be installed in dom0 by default or these three places in qubes-core-admin-linux should be changed to some other mechanism to display error messages.

[andrewdavidwong]

Are the references to Zenity and KDialog holdovers from the days when KDE was the default DE in dom0, or are these still necessary to support the present-day use of KDE as an alternative DE in dom0?

CC: @unman

[BetoHydroxyButyrate]

This is still an issue on 4.2. Easy to demonstrate:

touch /tmp/xx
qvm-copy-to-vm someVM /tmp/xx
qvm-copy-to-vm someVM /tmp/xx

This is because /usr/lib/qubes/qfile-dom0-agent has:

[nimda@dom0 ~]$ strings /usr/lib/qubes/qfile-dom0-agent | grep zenit
zenity --title 'File copy/move error' --warning --text 
[nimda@dom0 ~]$