Question: Why description and description URL arguments are mandatory?

[SemyonL]

The tool requires two mandatory arguments:

-d, --description <description> (REQUIRED)             Description of the signing certificate.
-u, --description-url <description-url> (REQUIRED)     Description URL of the signing certificate.

However, signing tools like azuresigntool, nuget sign, signtool do not require these arguments as mandatory. What's the reasoning of making those arguments required?

[dtivel]

These arguments are used for Authenticode and ClickOnce signing. If you aren't doing Authenticode or ClickOnce signing, it does seem weird for Sign CLI to require arguments anyway. The current problem is that Sign CLI doesn't know at the time of argument parsing if it will be doing Authenticode or ClickOnce signing. A signing operation could fail if these values were required but not supplied.

We should look into how to make this better. Ideas include:

• renaming the options (e.g.: --authenticode-description) and making them optional
• introducing a --dry-run option to see if a signing operation would require these options without actually signing
• defaulting these options to zero-length strings