[ ux ] Incomprehensible error message when locally installed app is run from another context

[buzden]

Steps to reproduce

Consider an application project an-application which is not in a pack collection with a local pack.toml declaring [custom.all.an-application] in it. Consider I invoke pack install-app an-application from the project's folder. Here CLI command an-application works perfectly.

Now, go to the folder which does not have the described above pack.toml and try to invoke an-application from the command line.

Expected behaviour

I would expect any of the following behaviours:

• an-application application being run with what was installed the last time, OR
• an-application command not being found in PATH, OR
• an error message saying that application package an-application is not found in the current context.

Observed behaviour

The current behaviour is falling with

/home/<username>/.pack/bin/an-application: line 6: [: missing `]'

Analysis

The reason for this behaviour is that inside the an-application command pack app-path an-application is being called, which falls with

[ fatal ] Unknown package: an-application

but this is not captured and this output is tried to be used as an application name to be run. Moreover, is seems that APPLICATION variable should be put in quotes during the call on the line 6.

[stefan-hoeck]

Thanks for reporting this. About the expected behavior: The first option is not viable, because some applications only work properly if the correct version is invoked for the current pack environment. The most obvious example for this is idris2-lsp. The second option would mean that we put applications on the PATH and remove them as well depending on the current pack environment. Again, I'm not sure how to best do this.

So, the best option would be the third one: Improve the error messages, probably by including the necessary steps to make the application available again.

I don't have much time to do non-work stuff at the moment, so contributions here would be highly welcome.