The 'is project restored' check doesn't work for projects that use nonstandard locations

[baronfel]

I'm trying to port the FCS docs over to F#F using the source at dotnet/fsharp, and I can't crack the projects with this tool because the restore check is very convention-based (and the FCS project doesn't put its restore artifacts under /obj/).

Would it be better to just issue the restore command ourselves? in the case of an already-restored project this is a fairly quick action.

[dsyme]

Would it be better to just issue the restore command ourselves? in the case of an already-restored project this is a fairly quick action.

That may well make sense yes. Or make that failure a warning and let it fail hard later?

[dsyme]

/repo-assist Please investigate and propose a fix if needed

[github-actions]

Pull request created: #1040

Generated by Repo Assist

[github-actions]

🤖 This is an automated response from Repo Assist.

I investigated this issue and created a fix. Here's a summary of what I found:

Root cause: ensureProjectWasRestored has two problems:

1. A logic bug where the try/with block wraps both the dotnet msbuild --getProperty:ProjectAssetsFile call and the subsequent "definitely not restored" failwithf — so the latter is caught and replaced with the less-informative "Failed to detect..." message.
2. When the MSBuild call fails for any reason (old SDK without --getProperty support, non-standard project layout like dotnet/fsharp), it hard-fails rather than proceeding. This blocks fsdocs on any project that doesn't use the conventional (projDir)/obj/ path.

Fix: Restructure the detection logic to distinguish:

• MSBuild succeeds + assets file exists → OK
• MSBuild succeeds + assets file missing → fail fast (project definitely not restored)
• MSBuild call itself fails → warn and proceed, letting the cracking step produce the definitive error

This directly follows your suggestion: "make that failure a warning and let it fail hard later".

A draft PR has been opened with this fix.

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