Bug 33154

The "Interaction" -> "Execute app" option in Impress is very buggy.

1. It does not know what do to when you supply a link to an actual app (on the command line it says it does not have a default app to launch that kind of file)
2. When entering a filepath in the textbox it won't launch, claiming on the CL that it can't be found
3. When selecting the same file as before from the file selector, it will launch the file normally
4. When selecting a script file, it will not execute the script but open it with the default application for that file, usually that's a texteditor.
5. The only way that it seems to be able to launch an application is when you make a script file with the file path, and do some MIME magic so that the default application to run it is something like bash, then it will run perfectly and as expected.

To elaborate on 5, what I did was the following:
I made a file called test.script
I edited it using gedit and added my link (in this case "/usr/bin/xaos")
Then I changed the default app to launch it with from gedit to bash from the file properties.
Afterwards I selected the interaction option on a textarea in my presentation, selected the execute app option, and used the file selector to select test.script
That was the only way I could get it to work.

I must say it was very disappointing it was not as easy to work with as macro's and seemed to be quite buggy/broken. I guess no one has given it any attention for quite a long time.

I discussed this in the IRC channel, and according to people there, it needs a secure re-write.