Boxstarter should report how many packages failed to install

[mwallner]

What You Are Seeing?

Invoke-ChocolateyBoxstarter doesn't provide any information if something failed along the way.

What is Expected?

(in case of 'no-reboots-required') either $lastexitcode or a try{ .. } catch { ...} should be sufficient to check if something went wrong.

How Did You Get This To Happen? (Steps to Reproduce)

using Boxstarter.bat

C:\myboxstarter\Boxstarter.bat pkg_does_not_exist
echo %errorlevel%

I'd suggest something like

if($chocoErrors -gt 0){
    $lastexitcode = $chocoErrors
    throw "got $chocoErrors Chocolatey errors"
}

here, right after the foreach($packageName in $packageNames){ ... }

[pauby]

If you used the throw statement it would stop the rest of Boxstarter. What we need to decide is if not being able to install packages is something that is a critical error or not. It may also come into the realms of #296 ?

What might be nice is if we have somewhere we can log issues / warnings / errors that the end user should know about and then, when everything is done, display them to the user? Something like a Add-BoxstarterIssue and then a Write-BoxstarterIssue (I'm just thinking out loud just now).

[mwallner]

I was also thinking about #296, in contrast to the (initial) suggested change there, this would actually try to install all packages, before setting $lastexitcode to the number of failed choco installs.

[pauby]

Rather then the number of failed installs (does it matter how many?) you could just exit 1 or 0?

I'm not against the idea. I think that:

1. Maybe we should turn it into a copy larger feature (such as recording the errors like I suggested above);

2. Would be interested in seeing the detail on how it's done;

[mwallner]

I actually don't care how many installs failed, the thing is that, with a current version of Boxstarter, it is hard to get some useful return/exit code that tells you if something went wrong or not.

I do like your suggestion with the Add-BoxstarterIssue, followed by a final Get-BoxstarterIssues | % { Write-BoxstarterIssue $_ }, but also would need to put something like

if ((Get-BoxstarterIssues).Count -gt 0) { 
  exit 1 
}

somewhere at the end of the default Boxstarter procedure.

(it should not matter, if you call Invoke-ChocolateyBoxstarter pkg1,pkg2 or Boxstarter.bat pkg1,pkg2)

[mwallner]

Just revisited this.
Note: when this is being implemented, take sure to note this:

If you used the throw statement it would stop the rest of Boxstarter.

meaning: reporting of the install error and setting of the return code must happen last, after Boxstarter cleanup-phase (UAC, Win-Update Settings etc. need to be restored!!)

[pauby]

@mwallner is this not fixed with PR #296 / #402 ?

[mwallner]

Short answer: no, this issue is something different as we're aiming to provide some feedback on which packages were installed successfully and which failed - after the Boxstarter procedure finished. (without the early-stopping bits)