Developing formulae or casks

[hlship]

Output of brew config

HOMEBREW_VERSION: 4.4.20
ORIGIN: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew
HEAD: 47ef1a3b0b742a78be35c016df6a0279d6035ebb
Last commit: 6 days ago
Branch: stable
Core tap JSON: 09 Feb 19:50 UTC
Core cask tap JSON: 09 Feb 19:39 UTC
HOMEBREW_PREFIX: /usr/local
HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS: []
HOMEBREW_EDITOR: emacs
HOMEBREW_MAKE_JOBS: 16
Homebrew Ruby: 3.3.7 => /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Homebrew/vendor/portable-ruby/3.3.7/bin/ruby
CPU: 16-core 64-bit kabylake
Clang: 14.0.3 build 1403
Git: 2.23.0 => /usr/local/bin/git
Curl: 7.87.0 => /usr/bin/curl
macOS: 13.3.1-x86_64
CLT: 14.3.1.0.1.1683849156
Xcode: 14.3.1

Output of brew doctor

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Warning: Some installed casks are deprecated or disabled.
You should find replacements for the following casks:
  adoptopenjdk

Warning: A newer Command Line Tools release is available.
Update them from Software Update in System Settings.

If that doesn't show you any updates, run:
  sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
  sudo xcode-select --install

Alternatively, manually download them from:
  https://developer.apple.com/download/all/.
You should download the Command Line Tools for Xcode 15.2.


Warning: Some installed formulae are deprecated or disabled.
You should find replacements for the following formulae:
  [email protected]

Warning: You have unlinked kegs in your Cellar.
Leaving kegs unlinked can lead to build-trouble and cause formulae that depend on
those kegs to fail to run properly once built. Run `brew link` on these:
  sphinx-doc

Warning: Homebrew's "sbin" was not found in your PATH but you have installed
formulae that put executables in /usr/local/sbin.
Consider setting your PATH for example like so:
  echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"' >> /Users/hlship/.zshrc

Warning: Your Xcode (14.3.1) is outdated.
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Description of issue

I'm attempting to write a Formula for a command line tool and I'm trying to install zsh completions for it.

The tool, dgt, itself generates the completions, once installed.

Here's the formula:

class DialogTool < Formula
  desc "Tool to assist in testing and building games using Dialog"
  homepage "https://github.com/hlship/dialog-tool"
  url "https://github.com/hlship/dialog-tool/releases/download/2.0-alpha-8/dialog-tool-2.0-alpha-8.zip"
  sha256 "687348118361dda0bcb204b4f96c892b32dc009caa4c8d18b85872e0062d56de"

  version "2.0-alpha-8"

  depends_on "vickio/dialog/dialog-if"
  depends_on "hlship/brew/aamachine"
  depends_on "borkdude/brew/babashka"
  depends_on "imagemagick"
  depends_on "frotz"


  def install
      bin.install "dgt"
      bin.install "src"
      bin.install "resources"
      bin.install "skein-ui"
      bin.install "bb.edn"

      (zsh_completion/"_dgt").write Utils.safe_popen_read(bin/"dgt", "completions")
  end

  test do
    system "./dgt", "help"
  end
end

I've been trying many different things for that last install line.

When I run this, I get:

~/workspaces/hlship/homebrew-brew > brew install -v   ./dialog-tool.rb
Error: Failed to load cask: ./dialog-tool.rb
Cask 'dialog-tool' is unreadable: wrong constant name #<Class:0x00000001303b5840>
Warning: Treating ./dialog-tool.rb as a formula.
==> Fetching dialog-tool
==> Downloading https://github.com/hlship/dialog-tool/releases/download/2.0-alpha-8/dialog-tool-2.0-alpha-8.zip
Already downloaded: /Users/hlship/Library/Caches/Homebrew/downloads/61278adc93565269c8a62bdf0a817406555703e6a28bd1aa66b5887f784e2452--dialog-tool-2.0-alpha-8.zip
==> Verifying checksum for '61278adc93565269c8a62bdf0a817406555703e6a28bd1aa66b5887f784e2452--dialog-tool-2.0-alpha-8.zip'
...
Error: Failure while executing; `/usr/local/Cellar/dialog-tool/2.0-alpha-8/bin/dgt completions` exited with 1. Here's the output:
~/workspaces/hlship/homebrew-brew > 

That's not giving me anything to run on; is there any way to get Homebrew to show me the stderr from running the dgt completions command?

If I remove that line and do the install, I can run dgt completions and get the expected output. So it's something about how Homebrew is running the command inside the formula.

Thanks for any tips or pointers!

[hlship]

I tried changing it to:

      (zsh_completion/"_dgt").write Utils.popen_read(bin/"dgt", "completions")

and the formula completed successfully, the _dgt file was linked correctly:

lrwxr-xr-x - hlship  9 Feb 14:21 _dgt -> ../../../Cellar/dialog-tool/2.0-alpha-8/share/zsh/site-functions/_dgt

... but the _dgt file itself was empty. Neither of these methods has real documentation.

[gromgit]

Have you tried using generate_completions_from_executable()? That seems to be the go-to wrapper for doing what you want in a Homebrew-compliant way, in use by almost 600 formulae in Homebrew core alone.

[hlship]

Yes, and it also failed the same way. In one of my variations, I could see that there was an issue writing to ~/.clojure/.cache; that's normal on first execution of the script (written in Babashka, an interpreted Clojure) as it downloads the script's dependencies on first execution.

What Homebrew didn't log was the user id it was running the command under (I think that result was via system).

My script will operate two ways: dgt completions writes to stdout, dgt completions <file> writes to the named file.

[hlship]

I've been looking for a way to write the _dgt script to a safe, temporary directory and then install from that directory.

[gromgit]

is there any way to get Homebrew to show me the stderr from running the dgt completions command?

Try looking in ~/Library/Logs/Homebrew/dialog-tool.

What Homebrew didn't log was the user id it was running the command under (I think that result was via system).

That would be the user you ran brew as.

[hlship]

Some progress:

  def install
      bin.install "dgt"
      bin.install "src"
      bin.install "resources"
      bin.install "skein-ui"
      bin.install "bb.edn"
  end
  
  def post_install
      (zsh_completion/"_dgt").write Utils.popen_read(bin/"dgt", "completions")
  end

This almost works. The "dgt" tool does run, and installs the _dgt file to /usr/local/Cellar/dialog-tool/2.0-alpha-8/share/zsh/site-functions/_dgt but it does not link /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions/_dgt.

[hlship]

The LLM told me that inside install we are sandboxed, which would explain the failures I've seen here (and others I did not share). post_install is not sandboxed BUT I don't quite know how to get the symlinks created, and ensure that they are removed if the Formula is uninstalled.

[SMillerDev]

That only happens for things that get set up in the install. The only way I see this working is if you get the dependencies to install in the sandbox.

[hlship]

Got it working:

class DialogTool < Formula
  desc "Tool to assist in testing and building games using Dialog"
  homepage "https://github.com/hlship/dialog-tool"
  url "https://github.com/hlship/dialog-tool/releases/download/2.0-alpha-8/dialog-tool-2.0-alpha-8.zip"
  sha256 "687348118361dda0bcb204b4f96c892b32dc009caa4c8d18b85872e0062d56de"

  version "2.0-alpha-8"

  depends_on "vickio/dialog/dialog-if"
  depends_on "hlship/brew/aamachine"
  depends_on "borkdude/brew/babashka"
  depends_on "imagemagick"
  depends_on "frotz"


  def install
      bin.install "dgt"
      bin.install "src"
      bin.install "resources"
      bin.install "skein-ui"
      bin.install "bb.edn"

      zsh_completion_file = buildpath/"_dgt"

      ENV["CLI_TOOLS_CACHE_DIR"] = buildpath
      
      system "bb", bin/"dgt", "completions", zsh_completion_file

      zsh_completion.install zsh_completion_file
  end

  test do
    system "./dgt", "help"
  end
end

This is specific somewhat to my tool, which normally writes some files to ~/.cli-tools-cache (as well as Clojure and Babashka, which write to ~/.m2 and elsewhere, but those did not seem to cause problems). The env var overrides that to a temp directory. I may change the code (https://github.com/hlship/cli-tools?tab=readme-ov-file#caching) to make it easier to turn caching off in the future.

[hlship]

You'd think that would work, but it didn't.

[hlship]

ln -s ../../../Cellar/dialog-tool/2.0-alpha-8/share/zsh/site-functions/_dgt _dgt
Error: Failure while executing; `\{\"SHELL\"=\>\"zsh\"\} /usr/local/Cellar/dialog-tool/2.0-alpha-8/bin/dgt completions` exited with 1. Here's the output:

[gromgit]

If the completions step absolutely has to be run with bb, then try this:

generate_completions_from_executable(Formula["babashka"].opt_bin/"bb", bin/"dgt", "completions", shells: [:zsh], shell_parameter_format: :none)

[gromgit]

You'd think that would work, but it didn't.

Another possibility is that the dgt script is not executable at the time of completion generation, in which case:

chmod 0555, bin/"dgt"

is the simple fix.

[hlship]

I'll check that on the next release.