openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix --best-effort-deliver alone sets delivery.mode='announce' as undocumented back-compat [1 comments, 2 participants]

Severity: low / Confidence: high / Category: maintainability Triage: risk Detected against: openclaw v2026.5.18 (latest stable at time of scan, 2026-05-18) Tooling: clawpatch 0.3.0 + acpx/claude-sonnet-4-5 via Brad Mills protocol

Evidence

• src/cli/cron-cli/register.cron-edit.ts:244-248 (None)

} else if (hasBestEffort) {
              // Back-compat: toggling best-effort alone has historically implied announce mode.
              delivery.mode = "announce";

Reasoning

The comment acknowledges a historical assumption but the behavior is not documented in the --best-effort-deliver help text. A user who passes --best-effort-deliver expecting only to toggle the bestEffort flag will silently change delivery.mode to 'announce'. This makes the edit command's behaviour differ from what the flag name implies.

Reproduction

Run openclaw cron edit <id> --best-effort-deliver. Observe that mode is patched to 'announce' even if the job had mode='none'.

Recommendation

Document this implication in the --best-effort-deliver help text, or require an explicit --announce alongside --best-effort-deliver and remove the back-compat branch now that there is a proper --announce flag.

Why existing tests miss this

No unit tests for the edit command option handling.

Suggested regression test

Test that passing only --best-effort-deliver emits a delivery patch with mode='announce' and bestEffort=true, documenting the expected behaviour.

Minimum fix scope

Update the --best-effort-deliver option description in registerCronEditCommand to state that it implies announce mode, and add a test.

Standardized clawpatch finding. Persistent in v2026.5.18 (not resolved by upgrading from v2026.5.12). Finding ID: fnd_sig-feat-cli-command-1de66cf308-_9b81b13812.