Add support for language not already on Linguist?

[drkameleon]

I'm the author and maintainer of Arturo.

The language is currently used by another project, Grafito and I want to be able to keep tracking pending TODOs via this action (great idea/job, btw! :wink).

The problem is I haven't yet submitted the language to Linguist (so that I can make a PR with the definition @ syntax.json and the corresponding data), but still want to be able to have this functionality. Would I be able to make the action view specific file extensions (in our case, .art files) as if they were written in a different language and thus processed correctly?

In Arturo, comments are pretty much REBOL/Red-like, that is like:

; this is comment

Any way this can be done?

[alstr]

Hey, thanks for the suggestion. :smile:

There are a couple of options that spring to mind:

• We bring languages.yml into this repo so it can be modified, but then it would be out of sync with future Linguist updates.
• We add an optional input to action.yml, say CUSTOM_LANGUAGES, that is defined by the user in workflow.yml. Something like:

CUSTOM LANGUAGES: [{"name": "Arturo", "extensions": [".art"], "markers": [{"type": "line", "pattern": ";"}]}]

As far as I know it would have to be converted by the action from a string because GitHub doesn't seem to support dictionary-style inputs (please correct me if wrong).

It would check for custom languages after it does the existing check, and process them similarly.

[drkameleon]

Thanks a lot for the reply!

Unfortunately, I'm not ultra-familiar with the internals of GitHub actions (and - quite a coincidence - I'm not a huge fan of Python either lol).

However, the way you put it, I would definitely go for the 2nd option: it would do the trick, plus you could keep the main languages.yml in sync.

Let me see what I may come up with...

[Christoph-Koschel]

Would it be better to create an external file in the workflow or the .github folder that is loaded during workflow start? Another idea is to leave a list of URLs in the action file, like 'CUSTOM LANGUAGES,' which redirects to a similar language.yml file. This would help avoid the need to rewrite the language definitions each time you create a new workflow.

[alstr]

That's a good idea.

Also, PR #163 included the .sht extension which isn't referenced in languages.yml so this could be helpful there.