makemessages doesn't say anything if you forget to specify a locale

cmackenziek · February 26, 2020, 5:56pm

Hi!

I’ve just been pulling my hair out trying to figure out why makemessages wasn’t working for me. Turns out I was forgetting the -l flag to specify a locale.

You have to pass either --all, -a for all locales, --locale LOCALE, -l LOCALE for a specific locale, or --exclude EXCLUDE, -x EXCLUDE to exclude a specific locale.

Shouldn’t this command fail in some way if none of the these flags are passed? I’d be happy to try and contribute something if this sounds like a good idea.

The exact command I was running (on Django 2.2.10) was:

django-admin makemessages -d djangojs -i project/static -i node_modules -i dist -i docs

So I wasn’t passing any locale flags, but the command doesn’t output anything pointing out this mistake.

andrewgodwin · February 26, 2020, 6:31pm

Unless anyone else pipes up with a reason why, then I agree with you - it seems foolish to have a silent error if you run it without any locales specified.

cmackenziek · February 26, 2020, 6:53pm

It seems this is implemented already:

github.com

django/django/blob/master/django/core/management/commands/makemessages.py#L332




if self.domain not in ('django', 'djangojs'):
    raise CommandError("currently makemessages only supports domains "
                       "'django' and 'djangojs'")
if self.domain == 'djangojs':
    exts = extensions or ['js']
else:
    exts = extensions or ['html', 'txt', 'py']
self.extensions = handle_extensions(exts)


if (locale is None and not exclude and not process_all) or self.domain is None:
    raise CommandError(
        "Type '%s help %s' for usage information."
        % (os.path.basename(sys.argv[0]), sys.argv[1])
    )


if self.verbosity > 1:
    self.stdout.write(
        'examining files with the extensions: %s\n'
        % get_text_list(list(self.extensions), 'and')
    )

I’ll keep looking into it.

cmackenziek · February 26, 2020, 7:41pm

The problems seems to be that locale is None evaluates to False, since its default value is [].

Changing line 332 to

if (not locale and not exclude and not process_all) or self.domain is None:

Should fix this. I’ll check the contributing docs to see how I should go about submitting a PR.

andrewgodwin · February 26, 2020, 8:18pm

Yup, that seems like it could definitely be the issue!

cmackenziek · February 26, 2020, 9:14pm

That was it. I’ve written a fix in my own fork, with a passing test. Does this need to be reported as a bug before creating a PR?

andrewgodwin · February 26, 2020, 10:02pm

You can make the bug and PR at the same time - just ensure they mention each other/link across so the Fellows know how to triage appropriately.

cmackenziek · February 27, 2020, 12:49pm

Done. Thanks for the help!

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makemessages doesn't say anything if you forget to specify a locale

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