From: H. Peter Anvin Date: Sat, 22 May 2021 09:08:10 GMT Subject: Re: RFC: error codes on exit Message-ID: <357C5DA0-6A1B-4A69-8BBD-5D12327C136A@zytor.com> In-Reply-To: sysexits.h numbers are the same across all platforms which have it, I believe. I think it originated with Sendmail wanting to know a bit more about why any subprocesses exited. On May 22, 2021 1:49:09 AM PDT, Junio C Hamano wrote: >"H. Peter Anvin" writes: > >> On 5/21/21 9:53 AM, Alex Henrie wrote: >>> On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 6:40 PM Felipe Contreras >>> wrote: >>>> >>>> It's good to not include many initial codes, but I would start with >at >>>> least three: >>>> >>>> OK = 0, >>>> UNKNOWN = 1, >>>> NORMAL = 2, >>> If you go that route, could you please pick a word other than >>> "normal" >>> to describe errors that are not entirely unexpected? I'm worried >that >>> someone will see "normal" and use it instead of "OK" to indicate >>> success. >>> >> >> > >Is the value assignment standardized across systems? > >We want human-readable names in the source to help developers while >we want platform neutral output in the log so that log collectors >can do some "intelligent" things about the output. If EX_USAGE is >always 64 everywhere, that is great---we can emit "64" in the log >and log collectors can take it as if they saw "EX_USAGE". But if >the value assignment is platform-dependent, it does not help all >that much. > > Side note. We had a similar discussion on and > strerror(); the numbers do not help without knowing which > platform the error came from, and strerror() output is localized > and not suitable for machine consumption. > >In a sense, it is worse than we keep a central mapping between names >programmers use to give to the new fatal() helper function and the >string the tracing machinery will emit for these names. > >Thanks. -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.