Inconsistent issue with upgrading to Nixos channel 23.11: Gnome extensions and gmenu missing

nPrevail · January 15, 2024, 5:33pm

This is a strange occurrence on several of my systems, but not all my systems have this error. I’m mentioning this error because it’s inconsistently replicated when I run nixos-rebuild switch, and I don’t know the cause of the issue.

All of my computers use the same config file. Some have been upgraded from channel 23.05 to 23.11, and some had a fresh installation from 23.11. Some of the systems that upgraded from channel 23.05 to 23.11 have experienced this issue with “gmenu” missing or not found. GNOME Extensions ArcMenu and Activity App Launcher are notably impacted with the following error:

Error: Requiring GMenu, version none: Typelib file for namespace 'GMenu' (any version) not found

Other systems seem to work fine, and some were upgraded from 23.05 to 23.11, but don’t show this issue. This issue has happened to at least two of my computers.

I don’t know how to replicate this issue, but I can see it exists. What’s the normal procedure to solving this dilemma?

_Andrew · January 16, 2024, 1:16am

That error message is typical of an extension that hasn’t yet been updated for GNOME 45, so I’d first look up what version of the extension is expected to work and then confirm what you’re actually running.

	Updated	Packaged	Running
ArcMenu	✓ 49	✓ 52	?
Activity App Launcher	✓ 39	✓ 39	?

gnome-extensions info 'arcmenu@arcmenu.com'
gnome-extensions info 'activityAppLauncher@rastersoft.com'

jtojnar · January 16, 2024, 8:20am

That sounds like the extension is not properly patched to run on Nixpkgs. Applying the necessary hack got a bit harder in GNOME 45 and it took me three attempts to get it working with GPaster.

It looks like ArcMenu might be suffering from the same issue:

github.com

NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/41a9a7f170c740acb24f3390323877d11c69d5ee/pkgs/desktops/gnome/extensions/arcmenu/fix_gmenu.patch#L9-L12


      
          +
          +import GIRepository from 'gi://GIRepository';
          +GIRepository.Repository.prepend_search_path('@gmenu_path@');
          +const {default: GMenu} = await import('gi://GMenu');

Sometimes you might get lucky and have the await load it in time but that is not guaranteed.