Background

The Cake runner supports a number of arguments, such --version to display the version of the runner, or --debug to launch the script in debug mode.

However, this make it impossible for these names to be used as arguments in Cake build scripts. For example, if one wanted to use the argument version as an input to the build script:

var version = Argument<string>("version");

And then run Cake:

dotnet cake --version=1.2.3

They would receive an error: Flags cannot be assigned a value

Workaround

The current workaround is to use the "remaining arguments" feature when using one of these "reserved" argument names:

dotnet cake -- --version=1.2.3

Proposal

This issue intends to make the necessary updates to allow existing "flag" arguments to be used in build scripts, so that if the user runs cake with --version=1.2.3 do not assume the flag --version and instead execute the Cake script with the argument ["version"] = "1.2.3".

This should work for all Cake runner arguments, except for Verbosity which is not a "flag" argument.

Related:

• Improve error message for reserved argument names