This comment was originally written by @seaneagan

Next best would be just having:

  pub run foo

run tool/foo.dart instead of bin/foo.dart from the current package.

This comment was originally written by @seaneagan

Also, it would be more consistent with pub global run. Since these are equivalent:

  pub global run foo
  pub global run foo:foo

These should be equivalent:

  pub run foo
  pub run foo:foo

Added Area-Pub, Triaged labels.

I agree that "pub run grinder" should run "pub run grinder:grinder", but I don't think we should make it more difficult to run local scripts. The behavior I'd like for "pub run $ident" would be to look for "bin/$ident.dart" in the local package first, and if that doesn't exist run "bin/$ident.dart" in the $ident package.

This comment was originally written by @seaneagan

I like your shadowing proposal, though I'd tweak it to look in "tool" instead of "bin" in the local package.

For example, with grinder the convention is to put your grinder script at "tool/grind.dart" (which could easily be changed to "tool/grinder.dart"), not "bin/grinder.dart".

Bob and I talked about this and we think you're right. We'd like a different syntax for running local executables, though; "pub run $path" should run a local executable at $path if $path isn't a Dart identifier (presumably because it contains directory separators and/or file extensions).

This will be a breaking change for running local packages, though, which means we should first add a deprecation message for the old "pub run $ident" syntax that points to the new syntax.

If you want to take a crack at this, Sean, we'd welcome your help.

This comment was originally written by @seaneagan

So, these would be equivalent:

  pub run foo
  pub run foo:foo

regardless of whether the local package has any foo scripts. And to run a local script you must specify the containing directory:

  pub run bin/foo
  pub run tool/foo

Sounds good to me, though it might be nice not to have to specify "tool/" by using the shadowing logic.

I would love to help out with that change, but I may wait to see if the pub code base moves to github as that'd make it much easier for me.

I don't think primary pub development is moving to GitHub in the near future, unfortunately. It needs to access dart2js's source, which is tightly tied to the repo. If you'd like to use git, though, you could use the GitHub mirror of the repo: https://github.com/dart-lang/bleeding_edge/

Set owner to @nex3.
Added Pub-Run, Started labels.

r44819 implements this with a deprecation warning. I'm going to keep this issue open until after 1.10 is released, at which point we should remove the deprecation warning.

Added Accepted label.

This issue has been moved to dart-lang/pub#1235.