Re: [PATCH] post-receive-email: do not call sendmail if no mail was generated

From: Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 8, 2009, 21:12 UTC
Message-ID: <h86hcs$in2$1@ger.gmane.org>
In-Reply-To: <7v4ord19da.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Thanks for CCing me in - I don't monitor the list closely enough these days :-)

Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> If generate_email results in an empty output in this codepath:
> 
> # Check if we've got anyone to send to
> if [ -z "$recipients" ]; then
> ...
> echo >&2 "*** $config_name is not set so no email will be sent"
> echo >&2 "*** for $refname update $oldrev->$newrev"
> exit 0
> fi
> 
> shouldn't we rather receive an error e-mail than let the
> misconfiguration go undetected?

I don't know if it's still the case, but when I wrote it, anything that went to standard error appeared on the client terminal, however, it could probably do with being a better description of who is generating the message, otherwise it'll be some anonymous error during a push, giving the user no clue as to how to fix it.

Show 5 quoted lines

> Before this check, I do not see anywhere generate_email would return nor
> exit, and after this check, there is a call to generate_email_header and
> that guarantees that the output from the generate_email function is not
> empty, so it looks to me that triggering this check is the only case your
> patch would change the behaviour of the script.

There is also a check for the validity of the update type above the recipients check.

I'm wondering actually if all of these should be "return"s rather than "exit"s. Better still would be if there were some sort of exception throwing mechanism in shell script - anyone know if there is?

Andy

P.S. Hope you're all keeping well.

-- 
Dr Andy Parkins
andyparkins@gmail.com