Tasks fail on unmet preconditions even when up-to-date

[benblank]

Description

When running the provided example taskfile, it fails with the messages:

task: `false` failed
task: Failed to run task "default": task: Failed to run task "some-task": task: precondition not met

However, if the preconditions for "some-task" are removed, it instead succeeds with:

task: Task "some-task" is up to date
task: [default] echo 'Running default!'
Running default!

In neither case are the commands for "some-task" actually run. Based on the documentation, I understand preconditions to mean something like "can this task run?" and status to mean something like "should this task run?" So it seems that Task is insisting that it be possible to run the task even when it knows it doesn't need to, which I find surprising. (And unhelpful. 😅)

My use case is that I'm trying to use Task to provision new hosts. One early task is "mkfs", which formats the partition; it has preconditions that ensure the partition is not currently mounted (which would prevent formatting) and a status which checks that the partition is already correctly formatted. The next task mounts the new filesystem. The problem is that later tasks need the filesystem to be mounted, but they ultimately depend on "mkfs", which fails because it's preconditions aren't met even though that task is up-to-date and doesn't need to run again.

Version

3.48.0+09e7247d (via Arch Linux package extra/go-task 3.48.0-1)

Operating system

Linux

Experiments Enabled

No response

Example Taskfile

version: "3"

tasks:
  some-task:
    preconditions: ["false"]
    cmd: "echo 'Running some-task!'"
    status: ["true"]
    run: once

  default:
    deps: ["some-task"]
    cmd: "echo 'Running default!'"

[trulede]

You might like to try the new if syntax: https://taskfile.dev/docs/guide#if-vs-preconditions.
And read the doc about run that will fix your other problems: https://taskfile.dev/docs/guide#limiting-when-tasks-run

Otherwise, the documentation for status and preconditions is clear.

[benblank]

Yes, I was looking at those sections of the guide (all of https://taskfile.dev/docs/guide#prevent-unnecessary-work, really) when creating this issue. I disagree that the documentation is clear about how they interact; it says that they are the logical inverse of one another, but not whether one takes precedence over the another. I still find it surprising that a task fails because it cannot run even when there is no need for it to run.

Your suggesting if surprises me, too — according to the docs, it's for "optional conditional execution", but this is a required task (which is already set to run: once; I'll update the example task to reflect that). The problem is that, when running Task a second time (because I changed some of the source files or the taskfile itself), that task fails even though it's already complete.