botskills connect fails when ludown tool has an update

[lauren-mills]

What project is affected?

botskills

What language is this in?

typescript

What happens?

When the ludown tool has an update available, the botskills tool errors out

What are the steps to reproduce this issue?

Install ludown version 1.3.1, then run the botskills connect command

What were you expecting to happen?

botskills connect should run even if the user has an outdated version of ludown. In this case, the latest version of ludown has a regression that prevents certain skills from being added correctly, so we need to be able to use 1.3.1

Can you share any logs, error output, etc.?

Any screenshots or additional context?

[Batta32]

Hi @lauren-mills,

We have been researching about the behavior of the external messages (like ludown execution) and we noticed that the comparison between the user version and the latest version available in npm is handled by process.stderr, thus the tool catches it as an error.

We created microsoft/botbuilder-tools#1226 to track this issue.

As a workaround, you can upgrade the latest version of ludown like following

npm uninstall -g ludown
npm install -g ludown@latest

[ryanisgrig]

@Batta32 we are currently blocked on a full deployment of our demo environments because of the issue found in #1949. Is there any workaround for us to use a lower version of both botskills and ludown where it would still run without breaking from that error?

[dfavretto]

@ryanlengel we created #2021 to allow the use of a previous version of LUDown, and now the Update available message won't break the Botskills process.
Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with!