antoine-coulon/skott

(cli): "-v" options cannot be used as an alias for verbose

ACHP opened this issue · 3 comments

ACHP commented

"-v" is actually used by sade as an alias for "version"

How to reproduce

skott index.android.js index.js -v

Actual

it will returns something like

skott, 0.28.2

Expected

It should print the logs like when specifying "--verbose"

antoine-coulon commented

Hello @ACHP, nice catch!

I'm not really using aliases myself so never noticed that actually. I think that sade default behavior should not be overridden, so we could find a new alias composed of 2 letters. Do you have any suggestions? You can even land a small PR directly if you want :)

ACHP commented

I tried monkey patching my current skott install and tried with -vv instead but it still not working.
I think that sade expect alias to be 1 char long.

To test my hypothesis, I tried using -ee (since you already use -e for the fileExtensions options).
And when I log the options I see:

{
 e: [ '', '' ],
/*...*/
 ee: false,
}

And the error message is Error: options.fileExtensions.split is not a function, which seems to validate my hypothesis.
I didn't manage to find a sade documentation about this. (But honestly I didn't search for long)

I also tried using -ts instead of --tsconfig as documented, but it didn't worked :/

skott index.android.js --tsconfig "./yolo.json"
# tsconfig: 'yolo.json', ts: 'yolo.json' ✅ Works as expected

skott index.android.js --tsconfig="./yolo.json"
# tsconfig: 'yolo.json', ts: 'yolo.json' ✅ Works as expected

skott index.android.js -ts "./yolo.json"
# tsconfig: 'tsconfig.json', ts: 'tsconfig.json', t: true, s: true ❌ does not work as expected

skott index.android.js --ts "./yolo.json"
# tsconfig: 'yolo.json', ts: 'yolo.json' 🟧 Works but shouldn't IMO (only `--tsconfig` or `-ts` should work `--ts` shouldn't)

skott index.android.js --ts="./yolo.json"
# tsconfig: 'yolo.json', ts: 'yolo.json' 🟧 Works but shouldn't IMO (only `--tsconfig` or `-ts` should work `--ts` shouldn't)

Conclusion

I don't know sade very well and to be honest I didn't spent much time on the doc, but I think it behave a bit weird ...
I would recommand

  • trying commander to compare the behaviors, and see it it works "better" (more work but no change from the user perspective)
  • Or replace all alias that contains 2 char to use one char, probably uppercase to avoid conflict (easier, but requires to update the documentation) (and to answer your question, I would use -V for verbose, of -vv if it worked)
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antoine-coulon commented

Thanks for this complete investigation!

Yes you're right, it seems that sade doesn't ignore multi char alias but requires a double dash -- instead of one dash like the docs show it (when running skott --help) so it's a bit inconsistent and misleading imho.

About one of your suggestions to avoid conflicts I just tested and it seems that the parser makes a difference between uppercased and lowercased flags, so skott -v or skott -V don't map to the same option but I'm not really a fan of that solution to avoid conflicts to be honest, I feel like uppercase/lowercase is not explicit enough to express different options, skott -v printing the version and skott -V enabling verbose/debug mode is misleading as hell.

Commander seems to work as expected towards the already established aliases for skott, that is multi char alias with one dash:

import { Command } from 'commander';
const program = new Command();

program
  .option('-vb, --verbose')

program.parse();

console.log(program.opts());

With the following command: node index.js -vb, commander actually prints Options: { verbose: true }.

So we could actually switch to commander, it should be easy as the whole CLI initialization is done in this file https://github.com/antoine-coulon/skott/blob/main/packages/skott/bin/cli.ts.

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