incoming exit status
Matt Schulte
matts at commtech-fastcom.com
Wed Nov 10 22:39:57 UTC 2010
On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-11-10 at 20:08 +0100, Jason Harris wrote:
>> Personally, I still feel that a valid command, that has executed in a valid way, returning a valid result of (nothing) should have an exit code of 0.
>
> Simply put, you're wrong. The grep command was created on March 3, 1973,
> so there's decades of historical and standards precedent for giving
> useful exit codes.
>
> There's also now half a decade of precedent _in Mercurial itself_ and
> people in this very thread have already pointed out that they depend on
> that behavior.
To be fair I think you are being a bit harsh. There are plenty of
reasons why a non-zero exit status would be considered an error. For
instance:
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Exit-Status.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_status#C
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_status#Java
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_status#Unix
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/exit-status.html
In my opinion I believe that returning an non-zero exit status should
equate to an error.
Though at the same time I think it is perfectly fine to say "sorry
that's just the way it is in Mercurial, so deal with it."
Matt Schulte
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