[lsb-discuss] Clarification of general LSB requirements

[Aaron Sowry]

On Wed, 2013-07-10 at 13:18 -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> There are a set of defined exit codes.  If you get EX_TEMPFAIL,
> retrying is a good idea.  If you get an error such as EX_NOUSER or
> EX_NOHOST, retrying would be pointless.  If the user doesn't configure
> the mailer, EX_CONFIG is the code to return, and an application that
> retries receiving an EX_CONFIG, EX_NOUSER, or EX_NOHOST would be
> insane (where insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and
> over again and expecting a different result :-).

Yes but these exit codes aren't mandated by the LSB, so I guess there's
no formal requirement that they need to be used. You'd probably get away
with using them though, in practice. Unfortunately lsb-invalid-mta's
"exit 255" is not defined by sysexits at all (in fact 255 > EX__MAX).

> But does it really matter?  A well-written application or a
> well-written system daemon should be able to deal with a sendmail that
> returns EX_CONFIG, regardless of whether the system is "LSB compliant
> or not", and regardless of whether exim or postfix is installed, or
> the above shell script.

Yeah it matters, because you've just gone from telling me nothing about
why sendmail failed (255), to *lying* about why it failed. The failure
has nothing to do with configuration, and throwing up red herrings like
that all over the place is not doing anyone any favours.

> Finally, realistically, if you think saying, "naughty, naughty, your
> system is not LSB compliant", is going to be a useful way to pursuade
> a machine owner to configure or install an MTA, I'll respectfully
> suggest that you are living in fantasyland.

I'm not trying to persuade anyone to install anything. If a piece of
software requires LSB compliancy, then either make sure your system is
LSB compliant or expect things not to work. All I'm trying to avoid is
people coming to me saying "my system *is* LSB compliant, but things
aren't working anyway".