Possible bug when passing variadic parameter variables to recipe dependencies

[marcaddeo]

In #2342 there was discussion of an alternative use-case for aliases where aliases were being used as the "main" descriptive name for the recipe and the recipe name was meant for internal use. Looking through the reasoning in #1725 and the discussion in #1302, it seems to me this use-case appeared due to a possible bug?

set positional-arguments

main-recipe *FLAGS:
  echo "$1"
  echo "$2"
  echo "$3"

r *FLAGS: (main-recipe FLAGS)

test1: (main-recipe '123' '456' '789')
test2: (r '123' '456' '789')

Given this Justfile, test1 will give the expected results while test2 will throw an error because FLAGS is parsed as a variable and evaluated to a single string 123 456 789 which cases only the $1 positional argument to be set.

Is this a desirable/intended behavior? Or should dependency arguments that are variables for a variadic parameter get split back into individual strings before getting passed to the dependent recipe?

[laniakea64]

It's working as intended. The current proposed solution for this use case is #1988 (comment)

[casey]

Yah, unfortunately this is working badly as intended. Variadic arguments are immediately space-joined, which is why they exhibit this behavior.