"Unable to parse version string" is not a specific enough error for win32 targets

[craxal]

I had some problems using electron-packager reporting it was "unable to parse version string", and it took me a while to find the cause. I believe that "Unable to parse version string" is too vague of an error message.

This error message should be improved to tell me which property it was trying to parse and the value it received and tried to parse, such as:

Unable to parse version string for 'build-version': 'private'
or
The value provided for 'build-version' is not a valid version: 'private'

For reference, the values I use are:

{
    dir: ".artifacts/app",
    platform: "win32",
    arch: "ia32",
    out: ".artifacts/package",
    name: "MyApp",
    version: "1.3.1",
    "build-version": "private",
    "app-version": "0.8.7",
    icon: "icon",
    "app-bundle-id": "com.microsoft.MyApp",
    "helper-bundle-id": "com.microsoft.MyAppHelper",
    "version-string": {
        CompanyName: "MyCompany",
        LegalCopyright: "Copywrite (C) 2015 MyCompany. All rights reserved",
        ProductName: "My Application",
        FileDescription: "My Application",
        OriginalFilename: "MyApp.exe",
        InternalName: "MyApp"
    }
}

See also electron/packager#552

[weedgrease]

So is the cause that it's a string and not a semver? I'm getting the same error trying to set the build-version to a short hash of the current commit of my repo but this error only happens when building installers for Windows.

[craxal]

That's right. More specifically, the string provided doesn't parse to a semver, which is exactly what the message says.

That's all well and good, but again, the message didn't give me any more information to go on. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong simply because the error message didn't tell me which property or value was invalid.

[MeTaNoV]

We have the same problem as @kevingelion , and I don't understand the difference between the platforms. In my opinion, a build version should not be constrained as the other version...
We are currently also using a short hash of the current commit!

[malept]

This is a limitation in Windows executables, there's not much rcedit can do about it.