Re: [PATCH] difftool: always honor "command not found" exit code

On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 12:30:28PM +0100, John Keeping wrote:

At the moment difftool's "trust exit code" logic always suppresses the
exit status of the diff utility we invoke.  This is useful because we
don't want to exit just because diff returned "1" because the files
differ, but it's confusing if the shell returns an error because the
selected diff utility is not found.

POSIX specifies 127 as the exit status for "command not found" and 126
for "command found but is not executable" [1] and at least bash and dash
follow this specification, while diff utilities generally use "1" for
the exit status we want to ignore.

Handle 126 and 127 as special values, assuming that they always mean
that the command could not be executed.

[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_08_02

Signed-off-by: John Keeping <redacted>

Looks good to me, thanks.

Acked-by: David Aguilar <redacted>

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On Sat, Aug 13, 2016 at 11:36:39AM +0100, John Keeping wrote:

quoted

It would be nice if there was a way to differentiate between complete
failure and just the diff tool exiting with a non-zero return status
because the files differ, but I'm not sure whether we can do that
reliably.  POSIX uses 127 and 126 as errors that mean the command didn't
run [1] so it may be sensible to to treat those as special values.

Something like this perhaps?  I think this is probably safe, but it's
always possible that some diff utility does use 126 or 127 as a "normal"
exit status.  I'm not sure what we can do about that oaaaather than add a
"really, really don't trust the exit status" option!

We can always add a mechanism for tool-specific error codes
later if we ever end up needing it, but this seems sufficient.

cheers,
-- 
David