The help screen for a bad SCIE_BOOT could be better.

[jsirois]

Here I use the scie-pants pants scie to demonstrate:

$ SCIE_BOOT=bad pants
Error: Isolates your Pants from the elements.

Please select from the following boot commands:

scie-pants
bootstrap-tools
pants
pants-debug
update

You can select a boot command by passing it as the 1st argument or else by setting the SCIE_BOOT environment variable.

Now, in this case, the error should be pretty obvious since I typed SCIE_BOOT=bad pants which is right there in the console along with the error message. Things are more mysterious though if I previously exported SCIE_BOOT=bad into the environment, in which case you just see:

$ pants
Error: Isolates your Pants from the elements.

Please select from the following boot commands:

scie-pants
bootstrap-tools
pants
pants-debug
update

You can select a boot command by passing it as the 1st argument or else by setting the SCIE_BOOT environment variable.

Better would probably be something like:

$ pants
Error: SCIE_BOOT="bad" was found in the environment but "bad" does not correspond to any pants subcommands.

Please select from the following boot commands:
<default> (when SCIE_BOOT is not in the environment): Isolates your Pants from the elements.
scie-pants
bootstrap-tools
pants
pants-debug
update

You can select a boot command by passing it as the 1st argument or else by setting the SCIE_BOOT environment variable.