[tex-live] tlmgr reports success when not removing packages

Norbert Preining preining at logic.at
Mon Jul 2 00:40:37 CEST 2012


On Sa, 30 Jun 2012, Adam R. Maxwell wrote:
> $ sudo tlmgr remove alg
> tlmgr: not removing alg, needed by collection-science
> tlmgr: no packages removed.
> $ echo $?
> 0

Hmmm ... welll ...in this case it is easy to say what should
be a proper return value. But what about htis:

$ tlmgr remove aa bb cc dd ee ff
tlmgr: not removing aa, needed by collection-foobar
Removing bb
Removing cc
Removing dd
Removing ee
Removing ff
...
$

What would be a proper return value here? I don't know! Success?
Failure?

I believe that the return value of "failure" should only be
used on *real* failures, like cannot read a file, broken access,
whatever, but not for something like this.

But as said, in general the return values are *NOT* at all reliable
nor have any meaning. THis is a project that I have open since long,
but never came around to do it. We would need to define for each and
every action what is success and what is failure ... and how to
deal with the above intermediate cases.

And for now I am too lazy to do this.

Best wishes

Norbert
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
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