DnD an app icon causes the entire wingpanel crashes

[ryonakano]

What Happened?

Regression of GTK 4 porting.
Originally reported at #710 (comment).

Better to watch the screencast:

Screencast.From.2026-08-09.15-30-40.mp4

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I suspect this is because the popover (display widget) of Applications Menu would be freed before DnD finishes and would be causing null pointer access, because it gets unparented by PopoverManager of Wingpanel itself when the popover is requested to be closed¹. And Application Menu surely requests to close the popover when starting DnD²³.

I confirmed commenting out the above popover.unparent (); in Wingpanel resolves this issue but we need to unparent the popover anyways at some point, right? So probably we might want to keep the popover open while DnD.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open Applications Menu
2. Try dragging an app icon
3. See the entire Wingpanel crashes (and restarts by Gala)

Expected Behavior

DnD an app icon should not cause the entire wingpanel crashes.

OS Version

Early Access

OS Architecture

amd64 (on most hardwares)

Session Type

Secure Session (Wayland, This is the default)

Software Version

Early Access or Compiled from git

Log Output

Hardware Info

No response

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/elementary/wingpanel/blob/acf9a51a8d1de4e136bd72c523099ef650856d84/src/Services/PopoverManager.vala#L76 ↩

2. https://github.com/elementary/applications-menu/blob/320297fb25ab8aa60d768eee10a5531ca495308d/src/Widgets/AppButton.vala#L118-L130 ↩

3. https://github.com/elementary/applications-menu/blob/320297fb25ab8aa60d768eee10a5531ca495308d/src/Views/GridView.vala#L86 ↩