Subprocess doesn't execute

[jay-pee]

I have problems to run this plugin. I saw that ankdown is not producing any output package so I tried to debug this by looking at the subprocess.run() returns in more detail. This can be done by using sys.stderr.write() so it is displayed in anki.

    tmp = subprocess.run([ANKDOWN, "-r", d, "-p", package_name])
    sys.stderr.write(str(tmp.stderr) + '\n')
    sys.stderr.write(str(tmp.args) + '\n')
    sys.stderr.write(str(tmp.returncode) + '\n')
    # AnkiPackageImporter(mw.col, package_name).run()

The output of this is:

    None
    ['/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ankdown/ankdown.py', '-r', '/Users/philipjanssen/Documents/Flashcards', '-p', '/Users/philipjanssen/Downloads/Flashcards.apkg']
    1

So the return code is 1, which mean some error occurs. If I run this code in the terminal with the exact same arguments I don't get an error and an output is produced. I don't know how to go on with debugging. Can you help me?

P.S.:

I tried to do the subprocess manually and only use the import part like so:

         # tmp = subprocess.run([ANKDOWN, "-r", d, "-p", package_name])
         AnkiPackageImporter(mw.col, package_name).run()

but even this dosn't work for me. I don't get any error but the deck is not imported :-/

[amorriscode]

@jay-pee just out of curiosity, do you get the following error in Anki?

It appears that the subprocess doesn't produce the desired outcome for me as well.

[benwr]

Apparently I wasn't "watching" this repo, so I didn't see this issue. I'll look at it this weekend.

[FlowFX]

@jay-pee just out of curiosity, do you get the following error in Anki?

It appears that the subprocess doesn't produce the desired outcome for me as well.

I'm getting the same error message. Do you need any debug info?

[benwr]

Argh, sorry; I've stopped using this plugin very much and have otherwise been busy; I'll try to look at it later today.

[FlowFX]

I've just started using it and like it a lot! The regular import method works fine, so no worries. Thank you!

[benwr]

I'm not totally sure what's going on here - @jay-pee is there a reason you're running the script from the global site-packages? are you sure that file is marked executable (questions go for others as well)? I'm running ankdown installed via pip install --user, so the binary lives in my home directory. if you do which ankdown in a terminal, does it print anything?

[benwr]

Also, re:

I don't get any error but the deck is not imported :-/

Are you sure? When it's working properly, the new deck doesn't show up immediately for some reason. I'm not sure how to update the Anki UI. But the deck does show up for me if, for example, I go to "Browse". And then at some point, Anki does update the UI to reflect the change. It works for me to just click "Decks" again.

[jay-pee]

I got it to run on windows, so that's great. However still have problems with Mac.

I started from scratch, due to long time not looking into this problem.
I installed ankdown now in my user folder with pip install --user ankdown.

I get this error message now when I execute the plugin:

Failed to import; received error: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/philipjanssen/Library/Application Support/Anki2/addons21/ankdown-plugin/__init__.py", line 49, in wrapImportDecks
    importDecks()
  File "/Users/philipjanssen/Library/Application Support/Anki2/addons21/ankdown-plugin/__init__.py", line 42, in importDecks
    subprocess.run(subprocess_cmd)
  File "subprocess.py", line 403, in run
  File "subprocess.py", line 709, in __init__
  File "subprocess.py", line 1344, in _execute_child
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/Users/philipjanssen/Library/Python/3.6/lib/python/site-packages/ankdown/ankdown.py'

Mac doesn't like that the Anki process wants to execute some script.
So I made the script executable by using chmod +x

Now I get another error:

FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'Programming.apkg'

So again the sub process doesn't execute properly, because it's not creating the apkg files.
When I use

tmp = subprocess.run(subprocess_cmd)
sys.stderr.write(str(tmp.returncode) + '\n')

in the plugin, to get the error code, I get 127 back.
I googled this and came to this stack overflow article:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1763156/127-return-code-from/17821481

This means "Command not found".
I don't know why I get this back. In the stack overview post they also mentioned that maybe some library is maybe not found. So maybe this could be the problem. However this is hard to debug.

Wouldn't it be easier to integrate ankdown in the plugin directly and not have to use a sub process? The setup process would be much easier.

[benwr]

@jay-pee when you do pip install --user ankdown, it ought to put a file called ankdown (not ankdown.py) somewhere, which is already marked with chmod +x (that's why I wanted to know what happens when you run which ankdown).

As far as packaging goes, Anki makes it kind of hard to package anything complicated, since you need to bring your whole dependency tree with you, and it all needs to run inside the Python that Anki is running: Ankdown has a bunch of 3rd party dependencies, and you'd need to package all of them. I actually originally tried to do this, but iirc ran into some kind of dependency hell when I tried to incorporate all of the libraries. I'd welcome a PR that made this change successfully, but I think it might be surprisingly hard.

I guess you could instead package a whole python binary, but then you'd need to make a different plugin for each operating system :(

[benwr]

Separately, I'm glad and slightly surprised to hear it works on Windows! :)