Re: [PATCH v4] send-email: prompt-dependent exit codes

[Oswald Buddenhagen <oswald.buddenhagen@gmx.de>]

On Wed, Aug 09, 2023 at 12:15:42PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>Oswald Buddenhagen <oswald.buddenhagen@gmx.de> writes:
>
>> From the perspective of a scripted caller, failure to send (some) mails
>> is an error even if it was interactively requested, so it should be
>> indicated by a non-zero exit code.
>
>I would agree that there should be a way to ask the command to
>indicate if some messages were not sent due to end-user request, but
>I have to say "From the perspective of a scripted caller" is a gross
>over generalization that I would not want to see in a commit log
>message of the project I run.
>
this gross error can be fixed by adding "likely" to the sentence.

>It should not be hard to make this opt-in,
>
that doesn't matter.

>and I still think it should be opt-in.
>
and i still think this would significantly reduce the value of the 
change.

the very idea of having to explicitly request that the obviously right 
thing is done is intuitively silly, and shouldn't be seriously 
entertained unless changing existing behavior can plausibly lead to 
serious adverse consequences. the minor nuisance of having to adjust 
wrappers to explicitly accept the most likely unexpected case does not 
qualify as such.

fwiw, other users who noticed this problem most probably preempted it by 
adding appropriate --confirm=* and --suppress-* options. but this 
doesn't fit my use case of a "light" wrapper.

regards