Re: [Acl-devel] [ANNOUNCE] attr 2.4.47

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

On Tue, 2013-05-21 at 16:17 +0200, Kamil Dudka wrote:
>      0
>         Successful completion.
>     >0
>         An error occurred.
Sure...


>    Exit status:
> 
>      0 success
>      1 minor problems  (e.g., failure to access a file or directory not
>        specified as a command line argument.  This happens when listing a
>        directory in which entries are actively being removed or renamed.)
>      2 serious trouble (e.g., memory exhausted, invalid option, failure
>        to access a file or directory specified as a command line argument
>        or a directory loop)
Well that's only a GNU "standard"... and to be honest, the examples seem
to be a bit fuzzy)... which is not even necessarily their fault, but
rather an inherent problem, given that the severity of a failure is
always a bit subjective.

I mean people may say a wrong command line parameter isn't severe at
all... one will immediately recognise it usually (the invocation fails)
and one can easily correct it (RTFM).
Or one could argue, that it is highly severe, as the invocation will
_always_ fail.


If attr should follow the GNU schema, I'd probably suggest to choose
1: attribute not set
2: wrong command line options, no support for xattrs, etc.
but even that seems not really good.

I personally would probably go for
1: any not further specified error
2: command line syntax errors

10: no xattr support at all
11: the xattr is not set (but xattr support is there)
etc.

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