(inkscape) Shims behave differently from raw executable (early termination) and cause race conditions

[mueslo]

Hello all,

I wish to raise an issue that has been a problem for quite a while, I previously already raised it here for other people that also encounter it, but not directly with any chocolatey devs until now, which recommended me to post it here. The following summarises the problem:

I have Inkscape installed via chocolatey. This installs Inkscape's inkscape.exe as a shim (#1347), and makes this shim available system-wide via PATH.

I am using a Python script which calls inkscape to convert an svg to pdf (the details are not super important, but it is jupyter nbconvert, in particular this part). However, this results in an extremely non-descript error. With some debugging I had found that the issue is that the output file supposed to be generated by inkscape does not exist at a time when inkscape already finished execution. However, manually running the same command works fine to generate the desired output. This suggests that inkscape, which resolves to the shimmed inkscape.exe, does not behave the same as the true inkscape.exe and terminates before it actually writes the output.

To confirm this, I tried running the Python conversion script using the following:

1. with a shimmed inkscape.exe and an explicit delay (1s) in the Python script
   -> works, no error
2. with true inkscape.exe included in PATH with precedence over chocolatey shims
   -> works, no error
3. with inkscape.com included in PATH with precedence over chocolatey shims
   -> works, no error

Further, the inkscape.exe shim generation does NOT use the -UseStart option which would explicitly supposed to result in this behaviour. You can convince yourself of that fact in chocolateyInstall.ps1:

if ($installLocation) {
  Install-BinFile 'inkscape' $installLocation\bin\inkscape.exe
  Write-Host "$packageName installed to '$installLocation'"
}

Therefore, I would like to ask what the use case is for the shimmed inkscape.exe but also other shims. The purpose of shims is to make executables available for the command line without polluting PATH, but if they don't behave identically, they should not be used.

Best wishes,
mueslo