Philip Martin wrote on Fri, May 31, 2013 at 14:23:35 +0100:
> Daniel Shahaf <danielsh_at_apache.org> writes:
>
> > On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 01:35:57PM +0100, Philip Martin wrote:
> >> I think something like that would work but I'm unsure whether we should
> >> provide it. I'm concerned that it would be making freeze special.
> >> Would we need to provide similar queries for upgrade, recover, pack,
> >> etc?
> >>
> >
> > For what it's worth:
> >
> > I wanted to add "Is a write-lock being held?" to 'svnadmin info'. That was
> > just on a hunch that it might be useful --- I didn't have a concrete use-case
> > (and that feature has not been implemented).
>
> I guess that would be implemented by a non-blocking attempt to get a
> lock. Occasionally it would see a commit holding a lock as well as the
> other longer running commands. I can't decide whether queries like
> that, or the freeze query, are useful.
>
> >> A timeout leads on to a question was about error handling. At present
> >> the return value of "svnadmin freeze repository program" is the return
> >> value of the external program provided freeze managed to run the
> >> program. If freeze failed to run the program for some reason then the
> >> return value is generated by svnadmin directly. There is no way to
> >> distinguish errors from 'program' from errors from 'svnadmin', they both
> >> return values in the range 0-255. Success, zero, is unambiguous but any
> >> error is difficult to interpret.
> >>
> >> I don't see any easy way round this. If we stop providing the 'program'
> >> error as the return value how else do we provide it?
> >
> > IIRC, some applications use the following strategy: "If execvp() failed,
> > exit 126; else, exit with the child's exit code (possibly zero)".
> >
> > Sorry, I don't remember which man page I saw that strategy in.
>
> At present a failed exec returns 255 (on my machine). The problem is
> that the external program can also return 255. If we document a value
> then callers know it is possible that exec failed but can't be sure.
>
Can't we just ask people who really care about all 8 bits of the child's
exit code to use the bindings?
> >> Invoke some post-freeze command and pass it as a parameter?
> >
> > I suppose the post-freeze command should be optional?
>
> I think so but I'm not sure how, or even if, it would work. Would we
> simply have the the same problem of how to return the post-freeze
> command status?
We'd have the failure mode that the freeze-hook failed to run (or ran
and exited non-zero). Callers also have to handle the failure mode
whereby 'svnadmin' itself didn't exist (which goes back to your "failed
exec reports 255" above).
Received on 2013-05-31 15:46:13 CEST