Testing local changes

[antoniolinhart]

Hi all!

Do you have any tips for testing the executables in this helpers repo? I am working on #67 and currently have some changes made in the main function to xgettext.rs to expect another parameter in the config from stdin.

It looks like it may be possible to call it directly, I just cannot find the correct shape for the RenderContext config:

Caused by:
    0: Unable to deserialize the `RenderContext`
    1: missing field `root` at line 1 column 75

Is there an example 'input' to this executable that someone could give me the template for? Or alternatively, is there a way that I can use this 'local' version of mdbook-i18n-helpers in a repository that uses it already like Comprehensive Rust? I was looking at this, but since Comprehensive Rust uses a specific version I wasn't sure if I could point the dependency on mdbook-i18n-helpers to a specific commit or similar in this repository.

Thanks for the help!
Antonio

[antoniolinhart]

Figured out the solution 😄

For others who are interested:

• Clone the comprehensive-rust repository (or the repository that makes use of this that you want to use)
• Override the version of mdbook-i18n-helpers with the local copy (keep in mind you will need to cargo install mdbook-i18n-helpers when you want to go back to the real version
  • cargo install --path ../mdbook-i18n-helpers/
• .. for xgettext specifically, set the config and then build the book
  • MDBOOK_OUTPUT='{"xgettext": {"pot-file": "messages.pot"}}' mdbook build -d po

[mgeisler]

Hi @antoniolinhart!

Sorry for not coming back to this earlier — but great that you found the solution. Basically, when you run mdbook, it will use the mdbook-xgettext binary from $PATH. So you can switch between different versions by running cargo install --path . inside the mdbook-i18n-helpers directory as you found out.

The above works for testing a binary. There is a related trick to testing fixes to Rust libraries. These are normally specified in the Cargo.toml file as

[dependencies]
foo = "1.2.3"

You can change this to a path dependency and make the program use a customized library from your machine:

[dependencies]
foo = { path = "../foo" }

[mgeisler]

I am working on #67 and currently have some changes made in the main function to xgettext.rs to expect another parameter in the config from stdin.

As a side-note, the way to test this would be to write a unit test. The mdbook-xgettext binary already has a few tests, but they test the functionality of the code after creating a RenderContext. You can also see how the binary is reading config values from ctx in its main function. I think you'll want to read more configuration values in the same manner:

    let split_depth = cfg
        .get("split-depth")
        .ok_or_else(|| anyhow!("Missing output.xgettext.split-depth config value"))?
        .as_int() // or similar, I didn't look up the toml API
        .ok_or_else(|| anyhow!("Expected an integer for output.xgettext.split-depth"))?;

You should probably not error out if the value isn't set: instead use a default so that users get the current behavior.