On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 11:08:02AM +0100, Julian Andres Klode wrote: > Am 14.02.2015 01:45 schrieb "Patrick Schleizer" <adrela...@riseup.net>: > > When "apt-get update" fails the program under some conditions exits with > > a 0 status. It would be useful if it exited with a non-zero status in > > that case (or if there were a switch to tell it to do so). > > > > Since there is already... > > > > - provide meaningful exit codes for network failures > > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=776152 > > > > and > > > > - apt: Provide meaningful exit codes for gpg failures > > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=745735 > > > > That have been found more or less by trial and error... I am wondering, > > if there are any other situations, where this could happen. > > > > Perhaps while you're at #776152 and #745735, could you please check if > > there are other cases, where apt-get exits with a 0 status, where it > > should exit with a non-zero status? > The results are meaningful. 0 indicates success or transient error, whereas > other values indicate a persistent error. > > Stuff like gpg errors are transient, they are expected to happen during > mirror updates due to the repository format.
So I really struggle with this assertion. Without any alternative mode this behavior makes it hard to use "apt-get update" reliabily from scripts. Sure, if you are doing an update run in the background, this might be fine. But returning 0 on a failing update is bad: for one you cannot just retry transient failures because you would need to check for non-empty stderr. Also if you expect your script to fail rather than to continue with bad input (because it's set -e), it does not. Something else might fail or you just include the wrong output into your disk image like in my case today. So pretty please, could we get a mode that is less surprising, in case you still don't want to change the default? :) Kind regards and thanks Philipp Kern
