[lsb-discuss] Clarification of general LSB requirements

[Jeff Licquia]

On 07/10/2013 02:18 PM, Aaron Sowry wrote:
> 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).

If we were to adopt the sysexits.h return values for sendmail in the
LSB, it would be fairly easy to implement in lsb-invalid-mta.  And it
sounds like there could be a use case for including those specifications
if your software is expected to react differently to different sendmail
error conditions.

And I note that lsb-invalid-mta could use EX_SOFTWARE or EX_UNAVAILABLE,
which don't seem to me to be lying. :-)

What do others think?  Should this be a candidate for inclusion?

-- 
Jeff Licquia
The Linux Foundation
+1 (317) 915-7441
licquia at linuxfoundation.org

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