[pkg-cryptsetup-devel] Bug#996177: cryptsetup: please report fatal errors without having to use -v

[Marc Lehmann]

Package: cryptsetup
Version: 2:2.3.5-1
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

I just had a somewhat lengthy initramfs debug issue caused by some
suboptimal cryptsetup behaviour.

Specifically, the machine didn't have enough ram, probably because the
default algorithm (argon) requires more ram than the machine had.

Unfortunately, cryptsetup silently fails - you get a password prompt, youc
an enter any password, your shell prompt appears without any message but
nothing happened.

Only when running cryptsetup with -v did it output an error message akin
to (repeated from memory):

   error -3 not enough memory

I think requiring users to use --verbose to see fatal error messages
is highly suboptimal behaviour. It would be nice if future versions of
cryptsetup would output error messages by default, at least when they are
fatal, i.e. the action could not be executed.

Thanks!

-- Package-specific info:

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 11.1
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (990, 'stable-updates'), (990, 'stable-security'), (990, 'stable'), (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'stable-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'oldstable'), (1, 'experimental-debug'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386, x32

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-8-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_IE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_IE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages cryptsetup depends on:
ii  cryptsetup-bin         2:2.3.5-1
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.77
ii  dmsetup                2:1.02.175-2.1
ii  libc6                  2.31-13+deb11u2

Versions of packages cryptsetup recommends:
ii  cryptsetup-initramfs  2:2.3.5-1
ii  cryptsetup-run        2:2.3.5-1

Versions of packages cryptsetup suggests:
ii  dosfstools              4.2-1
ii  keyutils                1.6.1-2
ii  liblocale-gettext-perl  1.07-4+b1

-- debconf information excluded