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

[John Kehayias via Bug reports for GNU Guix <bug-guix@gnu.org>]

Hi everyone,

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On Saturday, September 25th, 2021 at 3:02 AM, Liliana Marie Prikler wrote:

> I think the answer to that one is fairly simple. Guix should provide a
> mechanism to generate/link autostart services, ideally via (guix home),
> which will be upstreamed soon (idk if it has one such service already,
> just throwing it out there). However, the preferred solution is to not
> bother with autostart at all and instead use shepherd to manage user
> services – there is a tradeoff to be made between those management
> styles somewhere.
>

I agree we can have a better "Guix way" of doing autostart, documented with examples (perhaps a Cookbook chapter on Desktop usage of Guix). User run shepherd works, at least for some basic background services I run. I don't think it is as documented or as fleshed out as XDG autostart stuff. I too am interested in guix home (just merged!) and will take a look at that.

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.

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

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?

John