actions / actions/runner

Make errors parsing `::error` more discoverable

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bug
Dominant language
C#
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Description

Hi! Stumbled upon issue when if there's an issue with :error type of annotations, it's hard to discover it - some user first has to notice that annotations don't appear in commits no more and then investigate the logs for the details.

Would be great if runner could propagate those errors either to Summary or as Github action annotations.

The original case where I've met this issue was with output from Ruff (related issue - https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff/issues/22074)

It was creating annotation below:

::error title=Ruff (RUF022),file=/home/test.py,line=1,col=11,endLine=6,endColumn=2::test.py:1:11: RUF022 `__all__` is not sorted

Resulting in the following logs:

##[debug]Invalid error command value. 'col' and 'endColumn' cannot be set if 'line' and 'endLine' are different values.
##[debug]Invalid error command value. 'endColumn' cannot be less than 'col'.

But I guess issue has been there for awhile and if error messages were propagated to Summary page / as annotations, it would be possible to discover something like this sooner - without noticing from some feature breaking because of it.

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing how the runner parses ::error commands and how invalid values are currently reported in the logs. Reproduce the Ruff annotation example, then determine whether the error should appear in the job summary or as a GitHub Actions annotation; done means users can discover malformed command details without inspecting debug logs.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
csharp, github-actions
Domain
ci-cd
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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