[Aptitude-devel] Please review: proposed changes to aptitude error reporting

[Daniel Hartwig]

On 8 June 2012 22:15, Roger Leigh <rleigh at codelibre.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 08, 2012 at 09:55:03PM +0800, Daniel Hartwig wrote:
>> For example, aptitude install may fail to download some packages but
>> still manage to install others.  In this case a non-fatal error has
>> occured (non-fatal because some actions did succeed) and the exit
>> status is 2.  However, the exit status of 2 does not indicate that any
>> actions did succeed, only that some may have.
>
> This is still, from my POV a fatal error.  It failed to do what I
> asked.  From the sbuild POV, when we ask aptitude to install
> build dependencies, we only want success when every one of those
> is installed and configured.  Anything less than that is a failure.
> If it managed to install some of them, that's great, but it's still
> a failure.  Having a special return code for this situation is fine,
> so long as it's not success ;-)

Aptitude is effectively hardcoded to be like 'apt-get install
--fix-missing', thus it thinks it has done well to not install all
packages.  This situation will hopefully never again result in a
successful exit status.