File Roller not showing up in the Applications

[eugenialoli]

What Happened?

I have the elementary version of file-roller installed, but it's not showing up in the Applications. It's properly installed afaik.

I later installed the deb version from the repo, and the same problem occured: no icon in the Applications to launch it.

I installed the menu editor app, and it does show File Roller there.

If this is hard coded to not show up in the Applications, I think it's a bad decision, and I'd like to see it reversed.

Steps to Reproduce

File roller

Expected Behavior

To show up in the Apps list

OS Version

8.x (Circe)

Session Type

Secure Session (Wayland)

Software Version

Latest release (I have run all updates)

Log Output

Hardware Info

No response

[ryonakano]

If this is hard coded to not show up in the Applications, I think it's a bad decision, and I'd like to see it reversed.

It seems to be hidden intentionally for some reason.

applications-menu/src/Backend/AppSystem.vala

Line 155 in 6ad22d8

excluded_applications = { "htop.desktop", "onboard.desktop", "org.gnome.FileRoller.desktop", "org.gnome.font-viewer.desktop" }

[danirabbit]

It was hidden because it pretty much exists to be a utility for the file browser and its important actions are available as menu items in Files. Most people are either compressing a selection (and this is a tiny minority) or uncompressing an archive they downloaded (the vast majority use case). So much so that I think in some other desktops they don't even ship a separate archive manager but just add these actions to the file browser. (Which tbh we should probably do this as well)

[eugenialoli]

I hope this changes, because today I booted again on ElementaryOS, and unless I'm blind, I can't find a way to compress files from Files. I open the file manager, I select a file, and I right click. No menu item to compress anything. So I'm not sure what you're referring to. Maybe there's some other button that does that, but it was not immediately obvious to me.

[jeremypw]

@eugenialoli There should be a "Compress" item at the bottom of the context menu (below "Send by Email" and color tag chooser). This item is provided by the "Contractor" plugin which shows which contracts are installed in /usr/share/contractor. You should see usr/share/contractor/io.elementary.contractor.file-roller-compress.contract' and a similar extract-here contract,

The compress contract is:

[Contractor Entry]
Name=Compress
Icon=add-files-to-archive
Description=Create a compressed archive with the selected objects
MimeType=!archive;inode/blockdevice;inode/chardevice;inode/fifo;inode/socket;
Exec=flatpak run org.gnome.FileRoller --add %U
Gettext-Domain=file-roller

So you need the Flatpak version of file roller installed and the selected files must match one of the specified MimeTypes.

I suggest you open Terminal and use flatpak list to check that you have the flatpak installed. If so you could try running flatpak run org.gnome.FileRoller --add <insert-path-to-file> to check it is working properly.

[jeremypw]

Note this only works with the elementary file manager. If you are using a different one then it may provide this facility in another way.

[jeremypw]

This works OK for me on OS8 although there is a noticeable delay before the flatpak fires up for the first time.

[eugenialoli]

I thought I was crazy, but I'm not... the option is not there for me. @danirabbit

I think it's because I have also installed file-roller from the ubuntu repo too (because I couldn't see it in the menu, I decided to install the native package instead). But that shouldn't have done that anyway.

[jeremypw]

@Eugenia Yes, this should work out of the box - elementary should come with file-roller pre-installed. I am pretty sure it did for me.

[eugenialoli]

It did for me too. The flatpak is installed. It's just that the compress option is not there.

[jeremypw]

Can you confirm whether the expected contractor entries are present in /usr/share/contractor please? If so you can open them in Code to check whether the contents are correct.

[danirabbit]

Contractor entries aren't/can't be shipped with the flatpak. They're shipped separately in the deb package org.gnome.fileroller https://github.com/elementary/fileroller/tree/deb-packaging

[eugenialoli]

I have installed both packages, both the flatpak, and the file-roller from the repo (sudo apt install file-roller). Both are present. So I don't know why it doesn't show up.