Playwright - ar.json Missing

[ramadanomar]

Description

No ar.json found when testing locales for Typescript on WSL

Reproduction

1. clone the repo
2. run pnpm dev
3. After compilation i recieve this:
4. See error.

Screenshots

Environment

• Device: PC
• OS: Windows 11 WSL v2 Ubuntu
• Browser: Chrome

Additional context

To quote @sarayourfriend
The issue is that the ar.json file needs to be copied from the testing locales for TS to find them, but I think we should just @ts-ignore that line so that pnpm dev doesn't have to worry about tracking changes to the testing configuration.

Resolution

• 🙋 I would be interested in resolving this bug. (I'd love to try)

[sarayourfriend]

Just to confirm @ramadanomar, did you want to try opening a PR for this? I've assigned the issue to you in the meantime, please let me know if you're not interested and someone else can hop on this.

Thanks for reporting it and sorry for the trouble.

[sarayourfriend]

Also: I believe this is not an issue with WSL but any fresh clone of the repository.

[obulat]

I've lowered the priority for this issue to medium because the problem has a workaround:

1. Run pnpm i18n. This should download all the translations and locale files.
2. Run pnpm dev.

The issue occurs when you run pnpm dev in a cleanly-installed repository. You have no locale files downloaded, and pnpm dev only creates the file with the list of locales (src/locales/scripts/valid-locales.json) without downloading the translations. So, when the navigation.ts tries to import ar.json translation, it raises an error.

The solution of un-ignoring the ar.json file from git (in #1619) would mean that every time a new Arabic string is translated, we'll have to commit the new changes to the repository. The git history will be full of unrelated changes.

We could also just run pnpm i18n (without the no-get) in pnpm dev, but that would mean that we send network requests to https://translate.wordpress.org every time someone runs pnpm dev locally. This is unnecessary and might cause 429 errors.

The best solution I could come up with would be to add flags to the i18n locale strings that enable conditional loading of the translations.
The i18n script would always run get-translations, both for build and dev commands.
However, for dev command (maybe with a no-get flag?), it would check if ar.json and valid-locale files exist. If so, it would return without downloading anything. Otherwise, it would download the translations and the locales.

[sarayourfriend]

The TypeScript error occurs in the Playwright tests. Can we @ts-ignore that line with a note saying that the file sometimes doesn't exist?

I agree that copying the testing ar.json or adding the real one to the git history is not an appropriate solution, for the reasons you listed.