Just for reminder, this post is only categorized as note, the work was done by Ingo Brückl himself. I just happy and want to share this to everyone.

Archive manager in Linux comes in many type of instance, from lxqt, peazip, file-roller, engrampa, and lastly XArchiver. lxqt archive manager does support the feature of drag and drop, but it fell on it’s knees when facing with giant large archive file, this kind of problem doesn’t happen in file-roller, engrampa, or XArchiver. But these archive manager, either block drag and drop, or the drag and drop to other app doesn’t work at all.

This problem rooted when transition from X11 to Wayland, where some of the capability to drag and drop not all functionality are fully implemented, as example is XArchiver doesn’t support it due to missing protocol. I voiced/asked this in https://github.com/ib/xarchiver/issues/196, and Ingo Brückl confirm the problem. As I state before, it’s because of the compositor itself. So I just close the question and move on with my life.

Supprisingly, after a while (half a year), Ingo Brückl reopen the ticket, and he implemented some workaround partially, that works with Thunar. I rushing in rebuilding the XArchiver on my work laptop, as it use wayland with gnome (well at work, I very focus on touchpad, so you know the rest). The ability to drag and drop from XArchiver to Thunar make me have a big smile. It’s satisfiying and make my workflow less painful.

The question is, how to build it in fedora? Well it’s pretty simple. You only need several packages to able to build it. Run this command to install the packages.

sudo dnf install gcc automake gtk3-devel

With that, the rest is you only need to clone, config, make, then install. You can follow the documentation of Linux from Scratch (if you are confused, for me well just follow the readme)

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/ib/xarchiver.git
cd /tmp/xarchiver
./configure
make
sudo make install

Then, you are set for building the XArchiver. If you need 7z as the extractor, well just download from https://7-zip.org/download.html or install the package from fedora repo (but it’s old p7zip, I would rather use 7zip official file). You can put the file into /usr/local/bin/7z, and you are set.

It’s fun to see Open Source always full of wonder, human interaction, problem, solutions and fun! Hopefully this helps people who are finding a way or a question why the drag and drop doesn’t even work on wayland for xarchiver and how to tackle it. Thank you, and please do re-share it if you feel this is useful!