Bug#962158: lintian: Swapped exit statuses and --fail-on default value require downstream adjustments
Hi
On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 3:21 PM Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org> wrote:
>
> I can relate to this feeling so let me do this for you. At the very
> least, this change now won't hit bullseye before being resolved.
I also agree with this bump in severity. Thanks!
> This change means that any current caller which uses lintian as part
> of its acceptance testing will now silently let broken things through
As I explained on IRC this statement is probably untrue (and you did
not have the courtesy to mention that objection here). From what I can
tell, the FTP Master (who are arguably the one "acceptance tester" who
really matters) parses the tags. [1] Please let me know if you know
otherwise.
[1] https://salsa.debian.org/ftp-team/dak/-/blob/master/daklib/lintian.py#L73-74
> If the default change made sense due to some technical rationale, this
> effort might be worthwhile
As I likewise explained on IRC, Lintian's return status was
unreliable. Some program errors exited with status 1 and others with
status 2, while detecting error tags always produced status 1. Lintian
was also unable to use Perl's 'die'. The proper remedy was to always
use status 1 for program errors. That step alone would require any
automated user to examine their scripts.
The 'fail-on' command-line option resolved a long standing problem
with the implicit behavior your so cherish (#709932). Instead of
adding more complex options, the current solution is simple, elegant,
straighforward and explicit. And again, automated users already had to
look at their scripts. It was the perfect timing to make both changes.
Kind regards,
Felix Lechner
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