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

[John Kehayias]

Hi Leo, Liliana, et al,

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On Friday, September 24th, 2021 at 7:15 PM, Leo Famulari wrote:

> Maybe we could make the desktop file execute a path like
>
> "$HOME/.guix-profile/bin/syncthing-gtk"?

Hmm...these are both good points. And I think I may have run into stale files 
produced by some programs due to this. Actually, checking now, I see the same 
for redshift-gtk in the autostart .desktop file it makes (a /gnu/store link). 
So this is perhaps more common when programs create files like this.

I think there are a few possibilities and assumptions that go with them.

1. Rely on $PATH so that it can just be Exec=syncthing-gtk This is pretty 
common (non-Guix, at least) I think, but is an assumption. Seems safe for a 
program like this, but ambiguous, especially with Guix allowing multiple of the 
same-named bin to be installed at the same time.

2. Something like what was suggested by Leo, but we have to consider different 
profiles. Is that easy to account for in a build time patch? In my case it ends 
up $HOME/.config/guix/profiles/desktop/desktop/bin/syncthing-gtk Though I guess 
this happens at install. Perhaps the Python code can be patched to make 
something like this, based on its runtime path.

3. Remove the ability for these types of files to be created, as Liliana 
suggested. I think this is drastic though, changing the expected behavior in 
programs and difficult to enforce evenly. The point raised is important though, 
that direct /gnu/store links shouldn't be used in such a way.

Perhaps there are others. What do we currently do in Guix, or what would be 
preferred? From a user standpoint, I'd expect creating an autostart file (for 
instance) to work as created and to continue to do so.

John