system2 error when calling po_create

[LDalby]

Hi

In an attempt to fix r-lib/pkgdown#1985 I'm getting an error when calling potools::po_create().
I can't really figure out how to debug this one.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

#>   potools::po_create("dk")
Creating 'dk' R translation
Error in system2("msginit", args, stdout = TRUE, stderr = TRUE) : 
  error in running command

Session info

sessioninfo::session_info()
#> ─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#>  setting  value
#>  version  R version 4.1.2 (2021-11-01)
#>  os       Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
#>  system   x86_64, linux-gnu
#>  ui       X11
#>  language en_US:en
#>  collate  en_US.UTF-8
#>  ctype    en_US.UTF-8
#>  tz       Europe/Copenhagen
#>  date     2022-01-05
#>  pandoc   2.11.4 @ /usr/lib/rstudio/bin/pandoc/ (via rmarkdown)
#> 
#> ─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
#>  package     * version     date (UTC) lib source
#>  backports     1.4.1       2021-12-13 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.2)
#>  cli           3.1.0       2021-10-27 [3] CRAN (R 4.1.1)
#>  crayon        1.4.2       2021-10-29 [3] CRAN (R 4.1.1)
#>  data.table    1.14.2      2021-09-27 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.1)
#>  digest        0.6.29      2021-12-01 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.2)
#>  ellipsis      0.3.2       2021-04-29 [3] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  evaluate      0.14        2019-05-28 [3] CRAN (R 4.0.0)
#>  fansi         0.5.0       2021-05-25 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)
#>  fastmap       1.1.0       2021-01-25 [3] CRAN (R 4.0.3)
#>  fs            1.5.2       2021-12-08 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.2)
#>  glue          1.6.0       2021-12-17 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.2)
#>  highr         0.9         2021-04-16 [3] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  htmltools     0.5.2       2021-08-25 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.1)
#>  knitr         1.37        2021-12-16 [3] CRAN (R 4.1.2)
#>  lifecycle     1.0.1       2021-09-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.1)
#>  magrittr      2.0.1       2020-11-17 [3] CRAN (R 4.0.3)
#>  pillar        1.6.4       2021-10-18 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.1)
#>  pkgconfig     2.0.3       2019-09-22 [3] CRAN (R 4.0.0)
#>  potools     * 0.2.3       2022-01-04 [1] Github (MichaelChirico/potools@c6d6dd5)
#>  purrr         0.3.4       2020-04-17 [3] CRAN (R 4.0.0)
#>  R.cache       0.15.0      2021-04-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)
#>  R.methodsS3   1.8.1       2020-08-26 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)
#>  R.oo          1.24.0      2020-08-26 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)
#>  R.utils       2.11.0      2021-09-26 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.1)
#>  reprex        2.0.1       2021-08-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.0)
#>  rlang         0.99.0.9003 2022-01-04 [1] Github (r-lib/rlang@ce4aca5)
#>  rmarkdown     2.11        2021-09-14 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.1)
#>  rstudioapi    0.13        2020-11-12 [3] CRAN (R 4.0.3)
#>  sessioninfo   1.2.2       2021-12-06 [3] CRAN (R 4.1.2)
#>  stringi       1.7.6       2021-11-29 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.2)
#>  stringr       1.4.0       2019-02-10 [3] CRAN (R 4.0.0)
#>  styler        1.6.2       2021-09-23 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.1)
#>  tibble        3.1.6       2021-11-07 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.2)
#>  utf8          1.2.2       2021-07-24 [3] CRAN (R 4.1.0)
#>  vctrs         0.3.8       2021-04-29 [3] CRAN (R 4.0.5)
#>  withr         2.4.3       2021-11-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.2)
#>  xfun          0.29        2021-12-14 [1] CRAN (R 4.1.2)
#>  yaml          2.2.1       2020-02-01 [3] CRAN (R 4.0.0)
#> 
#>  [1] /home/au206907/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.1
#>  [2] /usr/local/lib/R/site-library
#>  [3] /usr/lib/R/site-library
#>  [4] /usr/lib/R/library
#> 
#> ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

[MichaelChirico]

Totally agree that's a super unhelpful error message :(

Could you try the following:

(1) share the output of msginit --version

(2) add the following verbose output & run again (it'll still fail, hopefully more helpfully):

trace(potools:::run_msginit, at=2, quote({writeLines(args); system2("msginit", args)}))

[LDalby]

 msginit --version

Command 'msginit' not found, but can be installed with:

sudo apt install gettext

After installing gettext I could run potools::po_create("dk") and got the expected result!

So maybe gettext should be a dependency so it will be installed during installation of potools? (Or the user would be notified that a dependency is missing)

[LDalby]

Thanks for the quick response btw!

[MichaelChirico]

I see... guess I filed #287 with perfect timing then!

extra detail: This is mainly a growing pain of the new dev functionality. The earlier workflow only had translate_package(), which runs potools::check_potools_sys_reqs() and would have caught this more helpfully. #287 will bring back the system tests to the new functions.

Thanks for filing! I'll leave this open to see if we can't improve the messaging somehow anyway.

[LDalby]

Yes, I did see #287 just now - good timing indeed 👍🏼