The packages could not be installed. Claiming the cosmic-* names put 62 files
in conflict with 25 distribution packages -- something dnf's depsolve never
reports, because it shows up only in rpm's transaction check -- and the only
way to satisfy that was Conflicts against all 25, which erases cosmic-greeter.
On a stock Fedora COSMIC that is the display manager, so the machine comes
back to a text console with no way to log in and no session to fall back to.
So the fork ships what it actually forks. The three changed binaries take
hyprcosmic-comp, hyprcosmic-session and hyprcosmic-conf, the workflow reduces
the staged tree to those plus this fork's own assets, and cosmic-settings, the
portal, the OSD and the rest come from the distribution at the version it
tested them at. No Conflicts, no Provides, nothing erased, and the stock
COSMIC entry stays on the greeter's menu to fall back to.
Debian is the exception and keeps the whole desktop, because COSMIC is not
packaged there in any suite: there is nothing to depend on and nothing to
install beside. Its stock session entry is dropped instead, since start-cosmic
execs the cosmic-session this rename takes away.
Run 31394740824 compiled all 27 components on all three distributions --
two and a half hours each -- staged them, passed the completeness
assertions, and then failed in the packaging step on every one. Three
separate causes, none of them the desktop.
desktop-file-validate rejects DesktopNames (fedora, arch)
hyprcosmic.desktop: error: file contains key "DesktopNames" in group
"Desktop Entry", but keys extending the format should start with "X-"
DesktopNames is the key a display manager reads to set
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP, so a session entry needs it, but the Desktop Entry
Specification registers keys for application launchers and the validator
has no entry for it. This is not something the fork introduced:
cosmic.desktop is upstream cosmic-session's file, unchanged apart from the
Exec path, and the copy already installed on this machine as
cosmic-session-1.5.0-1.fc44 fails the identical check. Dropping the key
would satisfy the validator and break the session.
So the validation moves out of the three packaging recipes into one step
against the staged tree, and checks what desktop-file-validate would not
have caught anyway: that Exec is absolute and names an executable this
package actually installs. A wrong Exec puts an entry on the greeter's
menu that dies silently when it is chosen, which is the failure that
matters here; a key the validator has not heard of is not.
The check was run against a staged tree built from the real desktop files
before committing: it passes clean, and it rejects an Exec naming a binary
that is not in the tree, an Exec that exists but is not executable, a
relative Exec, a missing DesktopNames, a missing Name, a missing [Desktop
Entry] header and Type=Link, each with a message saying which file and
what.
SIGPIPE under pipefail (debian, and arch next)
dpkg-deb: error: tar subprocess was killed by signal (Broken pipe)
The Debian package built: 217 MB, correct control, Depends computed by
dpkg-shlibdeps across 17 libraries. It failed on `dpkg-deb --contents
dist/*.deb | head -20` in the verify step -- head closes the pipe after
twenty lines, dpkg-deb dies of SIGPIPE, and Actions runs these steps with
pipefail. Both now write to a file and head the file. The Arch verify step
had the same line waiting for it and is fixed in the same way.
bogus date in %changelog (fedora)
10 August 2026 is a Monday.
Also: the PKGBUILD still pointed at tools/make-packages.sh, which was
deleted when packaging moved to Actions. It now names the two commands
that stage a tree and build from it by hand.
Bumps both forks to the commits that install at upstream's paths, and adds
the packaging that follows from it.
packaging/ holds one definition per distribution -- an RPM spec, a PKGBUILD
and a Debian control template -- and each wraps a tree that `just install`
has already staged rather than compiling again inside the packaging tool.
Building 27 Rust components a second time to produce bytes that already
exist costs hours and creates a way for the packaged desktop and the built
one to drift apart.
One package per distribution, not one per component. Fedora splits COSMIC
into 27 packages, which is right for a distribution tracking upstream. This
is a fork that replaces the desktop as a unit: there is no supported
combination in which you take the HyprCosmic cosmic-comp and the
distribution's cosmic-session, and one package says so accurately.
All three declare a conflict with the distribution's cosmic-comp and
cosmic-session, and stop rather than resolve it. Obsoletes would let a
routine install quietly remove the desktop the machine is currently
running; removing COSMIC stays a decision a person makes.
.github/workflows/packages.yml builds all three, each inside a container of
the distribution it targets, because nothing here is statically linked and
a package built elsewhere records sonames the installing machine will not
have. It runs on tags and on demand rather than on every push -- three full
desktop builds is hours of runner time for artifacts nobody downloads --
and a tag opens a draft release, not a published one.
The RPM file list is generated from the staged tree, and claims a directory
only when no package already owns it. A naive list would have the package
own /usr, /usr/bin and /usr/share, which belong to `filesystem`.
README follows the same reframe: the install goes to /usr/bin, the package
route is documented first, and the conflict is explained where a reader
meets it rather than left to be discovered.
gitops