Debugging File Encoding and File Path Distribution Bugs for GlobalChem with Github Action Bots.

Good distribution is a science and it has been the most painful thing to learn when trying to get people to use my data and tools I create to prove it. I’ve run into some pretty hard bugs that I felt were not so easy to fix.

The GlobalChem Action Bot Script is quite simple:

So this is how I pretty much test my system. And over time it really has helped me maintain the software, but also to my dismay knowledge can be a fickle thing where you know it’s not working. This bug sucked.

File Encoding

So here is the traceback:

Well that’s weird apparently on the “windows-latest” it can’t print my graphs to the terminal. The character in question is this ┌: something I was using to make a pretty terminal output.

I don’t want to lose this feature or lose my users. I went down this path of changing the character to something that fits. This also happened recently, where I had support and it was working but all of a sudden it just stopped.

Well it turns out, that the encoding might not be completely enforced for a windows user when running the script for standard in and standard out. Basically, I needed to tell the windows machine that the encoding for this particular package is utf-8 . I added these two lines to the MasterClass:

Fixed!

File Paths

Here is the traceback:

It couldn’t build the network. So it couldn’t fetch any of the nodes. Building the network relies on file paths.

I didn’t realize that Linux/Mac share similar file path strings where for Windows they install the letter for the hard drive or storage space followed by colon and for Github Actions they split the file path tree with “\\” instead of Linux/Mac “/”

To resolve this first make a check for Windows operation system in your code:

And then call the file naturally so:

And voila done. This roughly took me a couple of weeks to figure out since I was relying on the Github Action Bots and had to keep testing in my spare time until one fateful last Saturday I was just like fuck it.

Distribution on larger scale is tough and is definitely a science, I hope we can all figure it out the more we document all these bugs.

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