Re: Change in Lintian behavior: more granular exit code statuses

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Mon, 2020-05-25 at 16:24:23 -0500, Simon Quigley wrote:
> A change that I have been working on with Felix Lechner[1] has now been
> merged into the master branch of Lintian and should be landing within
> the next several weeks. We expect this change to land in Bullseye.
> 
> This change adds the --fail-on option to Lintian[2], and drastically
> changes exit code handling. Now Lintian will exit 1 on internal errors
> and there is *no default behavior* to exit 2. Specifying the --fail-on
> option allows the user to specify under which conditions Lintian should
> exit 2.

While the addition of --fail-on seems really nice, I'm not sure I
understand the reason for the default behavior change? As it is, I think
this will break many workflows where lintian's exiting non-zero on error
tags is how people automatically detect issues.

Why not simply add a value like “none” denoting to not fail on any of
the --fail-on conditions instead, and make the current default the new
--fail-on default value? This would not break anything by preserving
backwards compatibility and would make it possible to fix the bug that
triggered this by disabling any such errors explicitly.

Thanks,
Guillem