I was pleased to see that xdg-open capability is now included in snapd 2.28. However, using Ubuntu 17.10 without snapd-xdg-open installed clicking URIs appears to do nothing in Electron applications. So far I tested Visual Studio Code, Discord, irccloud, Atom, Wire and one that is embargoed. The following is logged to stdout when a link is clicked:
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name io.snapcraft.Launcher was not provided by any .service files
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name com.canonical.SafeLauncher was not provided by any .service files
If snapd-xdg-open is installed then links open again.
This issue does not appear to affect Qt and GTK applications.
If you install the deb package of snapd 2.28.4 from -proposed, does that fix the issue? If so, we miss to install the .services file in the right place for the re-exec case.
@Wimpress The SRU is uploaded to all ubuntu release, should be available shortly in -proposed and hopefully soon in -updates. However we will look into fixing this issue (the missing .service file) in a 2.28.5 release to ensure it works correctly for people who just use the re-execed core.
could you put on someone’s to-do list a task for writing a regression test for this to prevent it happening in the future? xdg-open is fairly crucial for desktop apps and the cross-distro support.