Re: [PATCH v4] send-email: prompt-dependent exit codes

From: Oswald Buddenhagen <oswald.buddenhagen@gmx.de>
Date: Aug 10, 2023, 10:00 UTC
Message-ID: <ZNS1VyGgtk9JmMe0@ugly>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqo7jgm3hd.fsf@gitster.g>

On Wed, Aug 09, 2023 at 12:15:42PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

>Oswald Buddenhagen <oswald.buddenhagen@gmx.de> writes:
>
>> From the perspective of a scripted caller, failure to send (some) mails
>> is an error even if it was interactively requested, so it should be
>> indicated by a non-zero exit code.
>
>I would agree that there should be a way to ask the command to
>indicate if some messages were not sent due to end-user request, but
>I have to say "From the perspective of a scripted caller" is a gross
>over generalization that I would not want to see in a commit log
>message of the project I run.
>

this gross error can be fixed by adding "likely" to the sentence.

>It should not be hard to make this opt-in,
>

that doesn't matter.

>and I still think it should be opt-in.
>

and i still think this would significantly reduce the value of the change.

the very idea of having to explicitly request that the obviously right thing is done is intuitively silly, and shouldn't be seriously entertained unless changing existing behavior can plausibly lead to serious adverse consequences. the minor nuisance of having to adjust wrappers to explicitly accept the most likely unexpected case does not qualify as such.

fwiw, other users who noticed this problem most probably preempted it by adding appropriate --confirm=* and --suppress-* options. but this doesn't fit my use case of a "light" wrapper.

regards