Re: passmenu on Debian with Wayland

[Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org>]

On Sat, Oct 25, 2025 at 14:42:43 +0200, Alex wrote:
> However, on my machine, the passmenu script is installed to
> 
> $ dpkg -S passmenu
> pass: /usr/share/doc/pass/examples/dmenu/passmenu
> 
> Before raising a bug against the pass package I wanted to understand
> whether this is correct? Why would an executable script end up in
> /usr/share/doc?

I'm not familiar with this specific package, but a very similar
situation happened with the "safecat" package.  If you install the
upstream version of safecat from source, you get /usr/local/bin/safecat
which is a compiled binary program, and /usr/local/bin/maildir which
is a wrapper script.  The upstream source code also includes MAN PAGES(!)
for both of these programs.  They're both meant to be installed,
and most people only use the maildir(1) wrapper program.

However, the Debian package only installs /usr/bin/safecat and the
safecat(1) man page.  The maildir wrapper program is not installed,
not even in /usr/share/doc/safecat/, nor is its man page installed.

See <https://bugs.debian.org/132520>, <https://bugs.debian.org/184920>
and <https://bugs.debian.org/220849> for starters (but note that at some
point, even the /examples/ subdirectory was removed from the package,
though I can't find a changelog entry for that).

In your case, it sounds like the Debian maintainer has done something
similar.  For *whatever* reason, they've chosen not to install this
wrapper(?) script, and have left it in /usr/share/doc/pass/examples/
as part of the upstream package's documentation.

My suggestions to you would be to do both of the following:

 1) See whether a bug has already been filed against pass, and if not,
    file one yourself.

 2) Create /usr/local/bin/passmenu which is the missing program that
    you need.  Copy it from the /examples/ subdirectory, modify it
    however you need, and use it.  Make sure you do this on all the
    systems where you need it, and that it follows you across Debian
    release upgrades, system replacements, and so on.

I hope you have better luck with your package's maintainer than I had
with mine.