I haven't looked into this totally yet but the amount of change seems way overkill 🤔 was there any upgrade guide for nopt that suggested the kind of changes that we might need to do?

I couldn't find any upgrade or migration notes from nopt that covered this specific behavior change.

While debugging locally, it looked like nopt v9 was treating string option values that start with -- as additional flags instead of plain string values. That was breaking cases like:

--options "--split 2 --random"

The masking/unmasking approach was my attempt to preserve the existing ember-cli behavior without changing the current command APIs or option definitions.

I do agree the patch ended up being a bit heavier than I'd ideally like though. If there's a cleaner way to handle this with nopt v9, I'm definitely happy to rework or simplify it.

I noticed yesterday in @bertdeblock 's PR that attempted the same thing he actually removed the test as it could be wrong 🤷 #10907

any thoughts?

I think the better fix is doing what's mentioned in ember-cli/ember-exam#84 (comment), and avoid any additional "parsing" ourselves.

That context helps, thanks.

While debugging, it still looked like nopt@9 was treating string values starting with -- as extra flags, which is why I tried the masking approach to keep the existing ember-cli behavior working.

But I agree the fix ended up being heavier than ideal 😅

I’ll read through the ember-exam discussion more carefully and see if there’s a simpler way to handle this without adding extra parsing logic in ember-cli.