RFC: wakatime-find-binary improvement

[pataquets]

I need to look for Wakatime's cli binary in ~/.local/bin. I'm aware I can manually configure it via wakatime-cli-path (my current workaround), but I was expecting it to work out of the box, as it's a commonly used directory alternative.

As per XDG Base Directory Specification, ~/.local/bin may contain user binaries.
Also, ~/bin is also a common binary location (at least in Ubuntu's default .profile: filesystem - What's the purpose of $HOME/bin directory? - Ask Ubuntu)

Checking the code, neither of the above paths is checked. At first I thought on adding them and sending a PR. On second thought, I wonder why is not executable-find being used. Maybe some function's built-in behavior is not desired.

Before going further, some feedback would be appreciated.

[pataquets]

@alanhamlett ping in case issue notification went unnoticed.

[gandarez]

@pataquets you can create a symlink for it?

[pataquets]

@pataquets you can create a symlink for it?

Sure I can, @gandarez. Thanks for the suggestion. But that would be also a workaround similar to the one I'm describing in my post.

However, the point of the issue is to get feedback on a more convenient (ie. no-user-workarounds-required) solution by improving the code robustness, as also described in the issue. Just checkin' to make sure nobody wastes time, if they feel like take a stab at it (which could be myself, indeed).

[A few seconds later, after checking @gandarez's profile and realizing it's a WakaTime org member... 😄]
Thanks again for the workaround. Any thoughts on the issue proposals/doubts? Is the proposed fix acceptable?

[alanhamlett]

I wonder why is not executable-find being used

Most likely because I'm not very experienced in Emacs Lisp. The convention in other WakaTime plugins is downloading wakatime-cli to ~/.wakatime/wakatime-cli-<os>-<arch>[.exe] then creating a symlink from ~/.wakatime/wakatime-cli to the platform binary. That's because some plugins are limited, or hang when detecting the platform, so it's more reliable for plugins to just always use the hard-coded path ~/.wakatime/wakatime-cli.

For wakatime-mode, if executable-find is better we can switch to using that after checking the common locations.