Rake task 'gettext:pot' silently fails on Windows

[glennsarti]

Problem:
I was attempting to run the gettext-setup gem on Windows against Puppet. This works succesfully on Mac, Linux and Windows Subsystem for Linux, however on native windows it gives the following message;

POT file locales/puppet.pot has been updated

However the file is not created and the message comes back VERY quickly. Running procmon, it is obvious that no files are being parsesd.

After digging around I found the problem is related to the following code;
https://github.com/puppetlabs/gettext-setup-gem/blob/master/lib/tasks/gettext.rake#L36-L41

Firstly I thought the command line was too long (it's MASSIVE for Puppet), However I made the following change;
From

           "#{files_to_translate.join(" ")}")

To

           "#{files_to_translate[0..1].join(" ")}")

Just to get the first two files and I received the following error (local git repo is at C:\Source\brannan-puppet);

C:/Source/brannan-puppet/.bundle/windows/ruby/2.3.0/gems/gettext-3.2.2/lib/gettext/tools/xgettext.rb:229:in `check_command_line_options': no input files (ArgumentError)
        from C:/Source/brannan-puppet/.bundle/windows/ruby/2.3.0/gems/gettext-3.2.2/lib/gettext/tools/xgettext.rb:149:in `run'
        from C:/Source/brannan-puppet/.bundle/windows/ruby/2.3.0/gems/gettext-3.2.2/lib/gettext/tools/xgettext.rb:34:in `run'
        from C:/Source/brannan-puppet/.bundle/windows/ruby/2.3.0/gems/gettext-3.2.2/bin/rxgettext:24:in `<top (required)>'
        from C:/Source/brannan-puppet/.bundle/windows/ruby/2.3.0/bin/rxgettext:22:in `load'
        from C:/Source/brannan-puppet/.bundle/windows/ruby/2.3.0/bin/rxgettext:22:in `<main>'
POT file locales/puppet.pot has been updated

It appears that this gem does not work on Windows.

[glennsarti]

Note - Running the same command outside of Ruby's system works correctly. e.g.

bundle exec rxgettext -o locales/puppet.pot --no-wrap --sort-by-file --no-location --add-comments --msgid-bugs-address '' --package-name '' --package-version '' --copyright-holder='' --copyright-year=2016 lib/hiera/puppet_function.rb lib/hiera/scope.rb

generates a correct pot file

[smcclellan]

@glennsarti Some changes have been made to how the gem interprets return codes for executables. Could you verify that this issue is still existent?

EDIT: And also please check the value for source_files inside config.yaml, as that is likely not picking up any files.

[smcclellan]

Just a thought, but using options in this style might work (containing both Windows and Linux path extensions)?

  source_files:
    - 'app.rb'
    - 'lib/**/*.rb'
    - 'lib\\**\\*.rb'