Using Github URLs are dependencies causes deployment failures with misleading error messages.

[s-maheshbabu]

Describe the bug

Github URLs is an officially supported way of declaring dependencies. ASK Toolkit fails to deploy with Github URL dependencies though.

To Reproduce

• Open package.json.
• Add a dependency like this: "ask-sdk-test": "s-maheshbabu/ask-sdk-test",
• Commit the change.
• Try to deploy.
• The deployment will fail.

Expected behavior

There are two issues to be fixed.

• The error messages are utterly useless and misleading. A better error message would 'Sorry, something went wrong'.
• Direct Github URL dependencies should work.

Screen Shots

On VSCode, the error looks like this -

On Dev Console, the error looks like this -

[nikhilym]

Hey @s-maheshbabu , thanks for creating the issue. The issue regarding supports for GitHub URLs seems to be specific to the Alexa-Hosted skills service itself. We raised a ticket with the internal service team and will keep you posted regarding that.

As for the error messages, this is what we get from the GetSkillStatus API that we use, to figure out if the skill deployment went ahead and if the skill build is successful. We are talking with the corresponding service team to enhance the API, to provide better error messages. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[nikhilym]

@s-maheshbabu thanks for being patient. We checked with the Alexa-hosted skills service team regarding the Github URL support and got to know that there service cannot handle this currently and there are plans on supporting this in future. I will update this issue whenever such support comes out.

With regards to the error messages, Alexa-hosted skills team knows about this issue and is working on providing better status messages in the API calls. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[github-actions]

This issue is stale since it has been open for 14 days with no activity. Please respond or this issue will be closed soon.

[s-maheshbabu]

Responding to prevent closure.

[s-maheshbabu]

I think issues shouldn't be closed automatically simply because there are no responses. Please create a different bucket for issues that you know are going to take time or remove the auto-closure setting.

[sattpat]

@s-maheshbabu sorry about this.
In the commit here you will find that a rule has been added to exempt issues marked - waiting: external dependency are exempted from the stale rule. The issue is the space in the label and this issue has been addressed in the V3 version of actions/stale - actions/stale#98. The reason we have not received this update is because we are using the V1 version. I am going to create a PR to update this and that would get looked at next week. In the mean time I am reopening this issue. Thanks for replying to this thread.