`updater.enable_notification=false` should disable version checking even in `version` command

[RobMeades]

Bug Report

In #1480 I had a problem with the update notification string from arduino-cli containing a unicode character which doesn't map to anything by default when run under a Python [3.8] script on Windows 10, causing Python to raise an exception. The conclusion to that was that I could either sort my goldarned Python/Windows code-page out or disable the notification with:

arduino-cli config set updater.enable_notification false

While the former was in progress I did the latter but I didn't actually check that it was working because I had already updated my arduino-cli version.

My problem is that the notification remains even when I've apparently disabled it, see below. What am I doing wrong?

Current behaviour

Dumping my config, you can see that updater.enable_notification is false.

>arduino-cli config dump
board_manager:
  additional_urls: []
daemon:
  port: "50051"
directories:
  data: C:\Users\rob\AppData\Local\Arduino15
  downloads: C:\Users\rob\AppData\Local\Arduino15\staging
  user: C:\Users\rob\Documents\Arduino
library:
  enable_unsafe_install: false
logging:
  file: ""
  format: text
  level: info
metrics:
  addr: :9090
  enabled: true
output:
  no_color: false
sketch:
  always_export_binaries: false
updater:
  enable_notification: false

...but when I run, for instance, arduino-cli version the "update is available" string still pops out:

>arduino-cli version
arduino-cli alpha Version: 0.19.1 Commit: 718bbbf2 Date: 2021-09-29T08:28:11Z

A new release of Arduino CLI is available: 0.19.1 → 0.19.2
https://arduino.github.io/arduino-cli/latest/installation/#latest-packages

Expected behaviour

I would expect to see just:

>arduino-cli version
arduino-cli alpha Version: 0.19.1 Commit: 718bbbf2 Date: 2021-09-29T08:28:11Z

...no "update is available" string

Environment

• CLI version: see above
• Windows 10Pro 20H2

[per1234]

Hi @RobMeades. This is how the feature was intended to work:
#1416

This behaviour you can disable it by setting the updater.disable_notification config or the env var ARDUINO_UPDATER_DISABLE_NOTIFICATION to true.

arduino-cli version command will always force a check for new versions even if the above config or env var are set.

The configuration key logic was inverted during the review process, so the final behavior is inverted from that description.

This is specific to arduino-cli version. The configuration setting will disable the notification for all other commands.

So this isn't a matter of you doing something wrong or a matter of the code not working as intended. We can consider this to be an enhancement request for updater.enable_notification to be applied to arduino-cli version as well.

[RobMeades]

Ah! I was just unlucky then - it so happens that the first command my script issues is to run arduino-cli version so that I have a log of that at the start :-).

[silvanocerza]

Yep, @per1234 is right. The version check is always done when running the version command.

In any case as I said in the other issue I strongly suggest you use --format json for parsing purposes.

[RobMeades]

Understood, it's just that we're not parsing this, it is simply for debug output written to a file, we don't actually need/want JSON formatting.