> The general problem is covered by policy, which requires all scripts to > either run set -e, or to test the exit status of every command. || true > shouldn't be widely allowed, perhaps this could be expressed as foo || [ > $? -ne 0 ], which accomplishes the same, but indicates to lintian that the > exit status is actually checked. (And the extra crud is reasonable to > discourage people from using it...) Proper error checking in subshells > should also be tested. > > I propose that lintian detect this as a special case, and trigger the same or > comparable warning as for the debhelper bug. (Ideally, I know that lintian > would grok Bourne). > > It isn't clear to me that any of the following have a special reason for > ignoring errors, though exim4-daemon-light comments on the need for > it...
Given that of the five packages you reported this against, two of them confirmed it was a false positive and initscripts looks like a false positive to me as well, this is not filling me with enthusiasm. I want lintian to catch common maintainer errors, but I don't want it to hen-peck maintainers or bug them about things they may have really meant. This is a hard one, since if the script is buggy the bug will rarely show up in practice, but I'm not sure a lintian check is the right approach. (And I *really* dislike the idea of telling maintainers to obfuscate their code to avoid a lintian warning.) -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
