Subject: bug#50789: syncthing-gtk creates autostart file with wrong bin

From: Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2021 23:23:36 +0200

Hi,

Am Montag, den 27.09.2021, 19:04 +0000 schrieb John Kehayias:
> [...]
> 
> But back to the matter at hand. Medium to long-term I support better
> Guix services for autostart, but that doesn't address the problem of
> having packages run as intended by upstream, at least with reasonable
> expectations. I think this is expected and reasonable behavior, that
> a program can create a proper .desktop file in Guix.
Unless you are running a dedicated desktop file/autostart editor like
alacarte or whatever gnome-tweaks has going for it, writing to
.config/autostart is not reasonable behaviour.

> Looking at another non-Guix system, the autostart files I have
> in  ~/.confg/autostart mostly (syncthing-gtk being the main
> exception) use just
> 
> Exec=program-name
The "full path" desktop files used in Guix do have some advantages. 
Also, on other distros when using stuff like systemd in a similar
manner to shepherd, you have full paths again.

> I see this mostly true for /etc/xdg/autostart as well (non-Guix
> system). So I think this is an easy and typical behavior we can
> implement. In this case patching syncthing-gtk to produce
> Exec=syncthing-gtk. Perhaps upstream would consider it as well,
> unless they have good reason for a full path here, as opposed to
> other programs. (Upstream is a bit quiet in activity though.)
> 
> What do we think?
I think upstream as good reasons to use full paths, e.g. to prevent the
wrong syncthing from being used when there are two in /usr and
/usr/local.  Were Guix to police upstream on this matter, the decision
would clearly be to make this feature optional at the click of a button
– and not one that annoyingly pops up if Icecat is not your default
browser, if you understand what I'm trying to say.

Regards