🐛 Bug: mocha fails silently on invalid package.json section

[dhdaines]

Bug Report Checklist

• I have read and agree to Mocha's Code of Conduct and Contributing Guidelines
• I have searched for related issues and issues with the faq label, but none matched my issue.
• I have 'smoke tested' the code to be tested by running it outside the real test suite to get a better sense of whether the problem is in the code under test, my usage of Mocha, or Mocha itself.
• I want to provide a PR to resolve this

Expected

I made an error in my package.json (an extra comma) because JSON is a bad format for configuration files ;-) like this:

"mocha": {
    "spec": "./*.spec.js",
}

I expected mocha to give me an error, ideally a bit friendlier than the one from npm, but something like that:

$ npm install
npm ERR! code EJSONPARSE
...
npm ERR! JSON.parse Note: package.json must be actual JSON, not just JavaScript.

Actual

Mocha just failed as if I hadn't configured it at all. This was very confusing:

$ npx mocha
Error: No test files found: "test"

Minimal, Reproducible Example

See "expected" above but basically:

npm install -D mocha

then add the offending section to package.json, then create foo.spec.js, then try to run mocha.

Versions

10.4.0 10.4.0 v20.11.0

Additional Info

I could definitely provide a PR if you could direct me to the appropriate place in the code (with which I am not familiar)

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

🤔 I don't reproduce this in https://github.com/mochajs/mocha-examples/tree/4b00891d6c7886f2d451e962a974478e7d3c1aa9/packages/hello-world. After adding an invalid abc to the top of its package.json:

$ npm run test
npm ERR! code EJSONPARSE
npm ERR! JSON.parse Invalid package.json: JSONParseError: Unexpected token 'a', "abc
npm ERR! JSON.parse {
npm ERR! JSON.parse   "n"... is not valid JSON while parsing 'abc
npm ERR! JSON.parse {
npm ERR! JSON.parse   "name": "hello-world",
npm ERR! JSON.parse   "versio'
npm ERR! JSON.parse Failed to parse JSON data.
npm ERR! JSON.parse Note: package.json must be actual JSON, not just JavaScript.

Could you post a standalone reproduction please @dhdaines?