Overriding config through nested aliases does not work

[DaniPopes]

Problem

Passing --config ... inside of a cargo alias, and using that with another cargo alias does not work.

Steps

1. cargo new test; cd test
2. .cargo/config.toml

[alias]
my_alias = '--config build.rustflags=["--invalid"]'

3. cargo my_alias c passes, but cargo my_alias check fails, indicating that the --config is not propagated through the c = check alias

Possible Solution(s)

No response

Notes

No response

Version

cargo 1.79.0-nightly (c93926759 2024-04-23)
release: 1.79.0-nightly
commit-hash: c9392675917adc2edab269eea27c222b5359c637
commit-date: 2024-04-23
host: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
libgit2: 1.7.2 (sys:0.18.3 vendored)
libcurl: 8.6.0-DEV (sys:0.4.72+curl-8.6.0 vendored ssl:OpenSSL/1.1.1w)
ssl: OpenSSL 1.1.1w  11 Sep 2023
os: Manjaro 23.1.4 (Vulcan) [64-bit]

[heisen-li]

@rustbot label +A-aliases

[epage]

Currently, the context is loaded in two phases

• GlobalContext::new at app start
• GlobalContext::configure once the whole command-line has been parsed.

This would require us to add a third phase and correctly merge it in. The most likely to get wrong part is related to verbosity

[weihanglo]

This seems to be an unsupported behavior that is accidentally supported. From the [alias] doc:

The value may be an array of strings, where the first element is the command and the following are arguments. It may also be a string

We may need to figure out since when it started working, and consider either banning or officially supportting it.