Setup CI to run tests on Windows

[dcastro]

Clarification and motivation

NB: we should probably do #165 first

We've been building and releasing windows binaries, but we haven't actually tested that they indeed work.

The readme also lists "Support for non-Unix systems" under the "For further work" section, so maybe we should invest some time into this.

The first thing to do is to setup a CI to run the haskell and bats tests on windows. GitHub Actions is probably the best way to set this up, see an example we can reuse here. The bats docs say it supports Windows, so this should be doable.

When this is up and running, we may (hopefully not) find some bugs, in which case we'll open more follow-up issues.

A few things that I think may be bugs:

• Backwards slashes in local links: [a](b\c). Github and gitlab both interpret this as a link to a file named b%5Cc. But on a windows machine, will xrefcheck interpret this as a link to the file c in dir b?
• This line expects rLink to be an "absolute reference" and begin with a /. Appending it to root with <> works on linux, but will this behave correctly on windows?

  xrefcheck/src/Xrefcheck/Verify.hs

  Line 319 in 955e0ea

  AbsoluteLoc -> checkRef rAnchor (root <> toString rLink)

Acceptance criteria

• We're using GitHub Actions to run the Haskell and Bats tests on Windows
• We've created issues for any bugs that come up

[Sorokin-Anton]

@dcastro I will try to run bats on my windows machine first, to see how bad things are, and then will try to learn how to add github actions. Am I right that windows machine will be hosted not on buildkite but on GitHub?

[dcastro]

@dcastro I will try to run bats on my windows machine first, to see how bad things are, and then will try to learn how to add github actions.

Sounds like a good plan! 👍

Am I right that windows machine will be hosted not on buildkite but on GitHub?

Yes, GitHub Actions have their own runners.

[Sorokin-Anton]

@dcastro that's what I gotv when simply run xrefcheck on Windows:
(builded from source with stack, launched from powershell in vscode)

PS C:\Users\Anton\projects\xrefcheck> xrefcheck.exe --ignored tests/**/*
Configuration file not found, using default config for GitHub repositories


xrefcheck.exe: <stderr>: hPutChar: invalid argument (Invalid argument)

"Funny" thing is that I can not reproduce that, and now I see question marks or some codes instead of some non-ascii symbols.

I think maybe we should disable progress bar and output coloring (as in #185) by default on Windows using conditional compilation - this is working in vscode but not in standard porwershell or cmd, where output contains many lines like this:

Verifying ←[97mlocal: [←[0m←[94m←[0m←[91m←[0m←[97m■■■■■■■■■■←[0m←[97m←[0m ←[97m]←[0m←[2m←[97m?←[0m←[0m ←[93mexternal: [←Verifying ←[97mlocal: 

Interesting fact: if I launch GHCi in cmd, coloring works normally, so maybe we could fix it

Also symbols ✓, ➥ and ⛀ (which we use for reports) are displayed as questionmarks anywhere (even in vscode terminal), and when I try to print them in GHCi, I see this old message

ghci> putStrLn @Text "\10003"                                                                                           
*** Exception: <stdout>: hPutChar: invalid argument (invalid character) 

[Sorokin-Anton]

I learned how to run bats inside so called Git Bash (mingw) , which looks like the only way to run them on windows, and almost all test s are failed, but for expected reasons

1: slashes in messages

   <   ➥  In file to-ignore\broken-link.md
   ---
   >   ➥  In file to-ignore/broken-link.md

2. Differently displayes error messages in network-related libraries

   <      ⛂  InternalException (HostCannotConnect "localhost" [Network.Socket.connect: <socket: N>: failed (Connection refused (WSAECONNREFUSED)),Network.Socket.connect: <socket: N>: failed (Connection refused (WSAECONNREFUSED))])
   ---
   <      ⛂  ConnectionFailure Network.Socket.connect: <socket: N>: failed (Connection refused (WSAECONNREFUSED))
   ---

(Did not tested advanced things with relative links, i.e. #165 yet)

We want that tests to pass, so I think that we should always use / in reports , so tests that fails like in (1) will pass.
Or we can replace \ by / inside assert-diff function, bt I don't think it's a good idea.
And we need to use some regex for network-related tests

By the way, coloring and progress bar are displayed correctly in this shell, I think we can recommend it to xrefcheck-windows users since it comes with git. Also I think that I will need to discover how to launch it in github-actions

[Sorokin-Anton]

Actually, stack test gives us a failure on Windows too, because canoniseLocalRefs strips toText ['.', pathSeparator]
@dcastro I think it should strip only ./, cause we are not supporting \ on Windows anyway
I can make a separate issue for that