/usr/share/applications/qemu.desktop should have an "Exec=" key.

According to the www.freedesktop.org .desktop-file specification, all "Application" desktop files should have an "Exec=" key. The one in qemu doesn't. 

This can be easily verified by running kbuildsycoca4 if KDE4 is present, but the issue is not DE-dependent.

Which binary exactly should be assigned as the default one, I don't know.

The specification can be seen here:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-latest.html#exec-variables

Adding an exec field would not be right, because QEMU can't simply be launched from the desktop without any arguments. There needs to be a long string of arguments given that are different for every QEMU that is launched. The only viable way to actually launch QEMU is interactively from the terminal, or indirectly via a 3rd party app like virt-manager. We only created the qemu.desktop file in the first place because Wayland needs this to be present in order to identify what Icon to display for a window. 

Note that  QEMU sets the NoDisplay=true property to tell desktops not to display this entry. I don't think KDE should be warning about missing Exec entry in this case.


I'll report a bug in KDE and let's see if the guys agree. Maybe it is a deficiency of the .desktop specification.


Thank you Lockywolf for this bug report.  Have you filed one against KDE as you previously mentioned?  If so, could you provide us with a link?  Thanks in advance!

I am sorry I haven't dealt with this bug for quite a while. KDE 5 is not properly working on my distro, and I wanted to test it when it stabilises. 

If qemu dislikes long-standing bugs, this bug can be closed, and I'll open a new one when I have time to test it on the new KDE.


What's the actual problem we're trying to solve here? What needs to be tested?

I can confirm that this behaviour is still present on kde 5.20.4.

You can run e.g. khelpcenter and observe:

kf.service.services: The desktop entry file "/usr/share/applications/qemu.desktop" has Type= "Application" but no Exec line
kf.service.sycoca: Invalid Service :  "/usr/share/applications/qemu.desktop" 


A bug on KDE bug tracker:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430157


The QEMU project is currently considering to move its bug tracking to
another system. For this we need to know which bugs are still valid
and which could be closed already. Thus we are setting older bugs to
"Incomplete" now.

If you still think this bug report here is valid, then please switch
the state back to "New" within the next 60 days, otherwise this report
will be marked as "Expired". Or please mark it as "Fix Released" if
the problem has been solved with a newer version of QEMU already.

Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience.



This is an automated cleanup. This bug report has been moved to QEMU's
new bug tracker on gitlab.com and thus gets marked as 'expired' now.
Please continue with the discussion here:

 https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/440