Code review comment for lp://qastaging/~andersk/unity-lens-applications/lp778202

I haven’t seen any such problems when testing my patch. For example, I can do Alt+F2 gcalctool, and I get a gcalctool that’s a child of sh -c gcalctool that’s a child of /sbin/init. The appropriate icon shows up in the launcher. I can middle-click the icon to launch another gcalctool. The new one is a direct child of /sbin/init. The two gcalctools are grouped in the same launcher icon, and clicking the icon raises both of them, etc. What else should I be testing?

Also, if BAMF gets confused by init → sh → gcalctool, why wouldn’t it be confused by init → gnome-terminal → bash → gcalctool, or by any of the myriad other applications that launch other applications via sh? If so, is there a bug report for this?

None of the spawn_async flags are relevant. There is a spawn_command_line_async that takes a string and maybe interprets shell quotes correctly, but it doesn’t accept a working_directory, so that would regress bug #736471. There is GLib.Shell.parse_argv, which does only the parsing part of spawn_command_line_async, but still it only supports a small subset of shell functionality (for example, you couldn’t Alt+F2 ‘sleep 5; do something else’).