Anyway, the reality is we *don’t* use processes and pipes for important things, *because* they fail roughly like this. You can say “but error codes” all you want, we don’t do this with browsers or ssh or gzip or REPLs (hello, Jupyter) or anything else. Because this hits a wall.https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/996231278276919296 …
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You can say it shouldn’t matter. But it really does. It’s nice to have Unix process management, it’s great to be able to lash things together with stringly types blobs, but eventually, we always move from pidgin to creole (to borrow phrasing from actual linguistics).
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Replying to @dakami
So how are process exit codes different from shared library return codes different, exactly? What makes it more likely that a stupid user will not check the former but will check the latter? Your argument is valid, but *this bug* is not a good example against processes and pipes
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If the bug were due to a weakly typed error message being ignored by default in a client then you'd have a point. But it isn't. The gpg command exits with a big fat retcode 2. That's just as good as a C function returning an error code.
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