We present an explicit realization of the Chen et al. approach to the proton spin decomposition in terms of Wilson lines, generalizing the light-front gauge-invariant extensions discussed recently by Hatta. Particular attention is drawn to the residual gauge freedom by further separating the pure-gauge term into contour and residual terms. Contrarily to a recent claim, we show that the Wigner distributions do not give access to the kinetic orbital angular momentum. Finally, we confirm from twist-2 arguments that the advanced, retarded and antisymmetric light-front canonical orbital angular momenta are the same.