Why the _ (private?) tasks are not allowed to be run from outside?

[mgzenitech]

I'm curious, because I have a case where I need to hide poe task from poetry poe --help but still be able to run it in part of automated calls. Maybe there are other ways to hide the tasks then?

[nat-n]

Indeed the thinking behind hidden tasks today assumes hiding a task from the docs and making it really inaccessible always go together, because a hidden task exists purely for internal usage.

It also provides a nice way to segregate the few special tasks poe has like poe _zsh_completion.

Could you tell me more about what kind of task you want to hide from docs but still be able to call it directly from a script? do you have many of these tasks? Maybe we could think of a workaround or elegant feature to enable this?

[mgzenitech]

So the task I had to create is basically merge_files which is triggered automatically by VSCode when developer edits one of few possible project files and final result is built configuration files from multiple sources.

Maybe it would be possible to relax the restriction of not being able to run _ tasks? Or at least having the ability to trigger them some other way...

Here's excerpt from my config for one of multiple merge ops:

  "runOnSave.commands": [
    {
      "async": false,
      "command": "poetry poe merge -s ${workspaceFolder}/.vscode/settings.*.json -d ${workspaceFolder}/.vscode/settings.json -t json",
      "globMatch": "${workspaceFolder}/.vscode/settings.*.json",
      "runIn": "backend"
    },
    ...
]

[nat-n]

Right so the basic scenario is that you have tasks that you want to run from another tool, but you still don't want them to be user facing/documented. I'll have a think about this.