Add option for Autostart to use the winget command alias or custom path so it can survive updates

[TeutonJon78]

Relevant components

• Standalone tray application (based on Qt Widgets)
• Plasmoid/applet for Plasma desktop
• Dolphin integration
• Command line tool (syncthingctl)
• Integrated Syncthing instance (libsyncthing)
• Android app or mobile UI in general
• Backend libraries

Is your feature request specific to a certain platform/environment? Please specify.
Windows win-get installs

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
If you do the winget install for syncthing tray and use autoruns, the path it uses is still to version specific binary. That means if you update, the application won't restart on the next reboot. The user will have to manually run the app and resetup the autostart option to link to the new version.

Describe the solution you'd like
Have a checkbox for something like "use winget link" (and this may be relevent for the scoops and choco releases as well, but I don't know how they work. Then rather than using the full local path to the object it would populate it with "%AppData%\Local\Microsoft\WinGet\Links\syncthingtray.exe"

And alternative would be to just give a text entry to define the specific path to the file along with a browse selection.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Doing it manually, which works. You can manually edit the autoruns in the registry. If manually updating you can also just rename the versioned executables to just be syncthingtray.exe

Additional context

[Martchus]

I will not add code that would hard-code winget-specific paths in Syncthing Tray. However, it would be possible to make this configurable. For the NixOS package manager one has already contributed a feature to override this path at compile time via the AUTOSTART_EXEC_PATH CMake variable. Something similar could be done for winget as well if needed.

I suppose winget packaging can't reuse AUTOSTART_EXEC_PATH because it is a compile time option and they basically just re-package the official binaries.

Alternatively the package maintainer could make it so that the executable is executed under its generic path. Then Syncthing Tray would naturally use this generic path without any additional complexity.

I suggest you ask the maintainer of the winget package to implement the change mentioned in the previous paragraph. If this turns out to be impossible for some reason we could figure out what is needed on the Syncthing Tray side to avoid this. Perhaps the same mechanism as described for the NixOS package could be implemented but via an environment variable (instead of compile time variable). I would accept a PR implementing that.

Note that I will not do any changes regarding the winget-package itself. For this you need to open an issue on their issue tracker.

[TeutonJon78]

winget doesn't seem to work that way. It makes a symbolic link that just calls the real executable. So the syncthingtray executable will always see the real path to itself, not the symlink path. And that will be what it puts in the autoruns registry section. Compile time also won't work as you said since it just downloads the binary. It's also made worse since since the version number and compiler is part of the executable names so it's a 100% going to change in each version.

I get not wanting to clutter code with platform/downloader specific things, but since several platforms seem to make use of the idea, wouldn't it be most efficient to add a text box path override? Hopefully with a browse button ("Select..." in your codebase), but even without) where people could just specify the path? That's at least OS/package manager independent and most of the code is already there for other options.

I just checked chocolatey, and that avoids the problem because they force rename the executable (which technically has a bug because they force rename synthingtray-*.exe to syncthingtray.exe, and the cli executable just kind of disappears in the process). I left a comment notifying that maintainer about the issue.

[shainave]

As a workaround on Windows, I decided to disable Syncthing Tray built-in autostart entirely, and instead manually add the symlink created by winget: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WinGet\Links\syncthingtray.exe to the Startup folder shell:startup (alternatively, one can add this to a startup script, a scheduled task, or whatever other method one is using to automatically load programs at Windows startup).
This ensures the path remains consistent across updates and also preserves taskbar settings, such as showing the Syncthing Tray icon under Taskbar Settings > Other system tray icons without requiring you to re-enable the setting after every update.