urlwatch fails to find example files when launched from /usr/sbin

[RunningDroid]

It also opens a blank file instead of opening the example urls.yaml:

$ rm -r .config/urlwatch
$ urlwatch --verbose --edit
2023-04-11 20:22:49,842 cli INFO: turning on verbose logging mode
2023-04-11 20:22:49,843 minidb DEBUG: PRAGMA table_info(CacheEntry)
2023-04-11 20:22:49,843 main INFO: Using /home/runningdroid/.config/urlwatch/urls.yaml as URLs file
2023-04-11 20:22:49,843 main INFO: Using /home/runningdroid/.config/urlwatch/hooks.py for hooks
2023-04-11 20:22:49,843 main INFO: Using /home/runningdroid/.cache/urlwatch/cache.db as cache database

    A default config has been written to /home/runningdroid/.config/urlwatch/urlwatch.yaml.
    Use "urlwatch --edit-config" to customize it.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/urlwatch", line 33, in <module>
    sys.exit(load_entry_point('urlwatch==2.26', 'console_scripts', 'urlwatch')())
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/urlwatch/cli.py", line 112, in main
    urlwatch_command.run()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/urlwatch/command.py", line 458, in run
    self.handle_actions()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/urlwatch/command.py", line 252, in handle_actions
    sys.exit(self.urlwatcher.urls_storage.edit(self.urlwatch_config.urls_yaml_example))
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/urlwatch/storage.py", line 285, in edit
    atomic_rename(file_edit, self.filename)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.11/site-packages/urlwatch/util.py", line 94, in atomic_rename
    os.rename(old_filename, new_filename)
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/runningdroid/.config/urlwatch/urls.edit.yaml' -> '/home/runningdroid/.config/urlwatch/urls.yaml'

Doing cp /usr/share/urlwatch/examples/urls.yaml.example ~/.config/urlwatch/urls.yaml works around this for users that have urlwatch installed as a system package.

[thp]

It seems to be that in your case, urlwatch is installed into /usr/sbin/urlwatch instead of /usr/bin/urlwatch (or that /usr/sbin appears first in your $PATH, and on Void Linux, /usr/sbin is a symlink to /usr/bin?).

In order to determine whether the program is run from a source checkout or a system-wide installation, this is used (the assumption here is that if the urlwatch script is in a folder named bin, assume system-wide installation, otherwise assume a source checkout):

https://github.com/thp/urlwatch/blob/d67443983d29cd0100668a8a90a15f02f2a78de3/lib/urlwatch/cli.py#L47-L51

Both prefix and bindir from the code snippet above are then used to construct a path to the examples:

https://github.com/thp/urlwatch/blob/d67443983d29cd0100668a8a90a15f02f2a78de3/lib/urlwatch/config.py#L62-L67

There are multiple ways to fix this:

• Quick workaround for you locally: Make sure /usr/bin appears before /usr/sbin in your $PATH
• Change == 'bin' to in ('bin', 'sbin') to support cases where it's launched from sbin
• Use os.path.realpath() to remove symlinks in the path
• Instead of detecting a system-wide installation via bin, try to detect a source checkout instead

I'll try to come up with a workaround. This isn't really a regression, but has been like that since ~ 2008 in urlwatch (according to git blame), and probably affects Void Linux since July 2015 (according to the blog post linked above) :)

[thp]

Additional information for the fix in 6b68afbb047060277b00f570345e7e1969266712: Since the urlwatch script that gets installed system-wide (or in $HOME if installed via pip install --user) is different from the urlwatch script in the source checkout, the special-case handling of that can just go into the urlwatch script. Also cleaned up some other things (e.g. sys.path.insert() wasn't necessary, as the urlwatch script was already doing this).

[RunningDroid]

This isn't really a regression, but has been like that since ~ 2008 in urlwatch (according to git blame), and probably affects Void Linux since July 2015 (according to the blog post linked above) :)

My bad, I assumed it was a regression because it worked on one machine with urlwatch 2.25 but not on a different machine that I'd updated to urlwatch 2.26. Apparently urlwatch behaved differently because the machine running urlwatch 2.25 had /usr/bin before /usr/sbin and the one I'd updated had /usr/sbin before /usr/bin.

(I don't know why the paths are ordered differently when all the relevant config files are identical, but that's a separate problem.)