[Adduser-devel] Questions for the team

[Stephen Gran]

This one time, at band camp, Joerg Hoh said:
> Hi Stephen
> 
> On Thu, Feb 15, 2007 at 12:22:22AM +0000, Stephen Gran wrote:
> > Hey all,
> > 
> > Well, actually, all might just be you and I, Joerg :O
> > 
> > Why did the exit status of --help and --version get changed to 1?  It's
> > traditionalt to exit 0 after those switches.  help output should be
> > displayed and then exit 1 if an unknown parameter was passed, but that's
> > a different issue.
> 
> I updated recently the manpage and added some works about the return
> values. I haven't documented them in case of --help and --version. 

I saw that, thank you very much for the documentation work.

> Is the return value in that case really relevant? Most times I use --help
> oder --version, I do it interactively and don't care about them. 
> 
> (For --version it would be good to return zero as somebody may parse the
> return value...)

I'm just used to the semi standardized way of presenting --help and
--version output that exits 0.  A program exiting non-zero has always
felt like there was a problem, to me, and these two are not problem
cases.  YMMV, of course, but it doesn't "feel right", somehow.

> > After we have this discussed and/or cleaned up, how do people feel about
> > an upload?  I wouldn't mind getting the silly bug reported by joey
> > closed.  I am still undecided about the other recent bug by Justin
> > (adduser --group --gid doesn't add a group).  I think this is primarily
> > a documentation bug, as it looks to me like adduser --group is intended
> > to mean something else (although, tbh, I'm not completely sure what).
> 
> We should remove the --group support for adduser. For that purpose we have
> addgroup. For one of the next versions I plan to deprecate this
> parameter.

OK, I'm fine with that.

Thanks,
-- 
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|   ,''`.                                            Stephen Gran |
|  : :' :                                        sgran at debian.org |
|  `. `'                        Debian user, admin, and developer |
|    `-                                     http://www.debian.org |
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