[lsb-discuss] Clarification of general LSB requirements

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Thu Jul 11 04:24:17 UTC 2013


Jeff Licquia <licquia at linuxfoundation.org> writes:

> 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?

I think so.  Those exit statuses have been very widely used in mail
systems for quite some time and are very handy to have available and
standardized when writing any software that is intended to receive and act
on incoming mail.

It's particularly useful, when writing that kind of software, to know
which exit statuses will bounce the mail and which will defer it.

I don't think they've changed in many years, and so far as I know all the
major mail systems implement them consistently, so I suspect all systems
that currently aim for LSB compliance probably already comply with proper
handling of those exit statuses, which is a nice bonus.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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