Detailed exit codes in facter

[Will Hopper]

Hey all,

As brought up by https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/FACT-1429, facter currently returns an exit code of 0 when a non-existent fact is queried. Thus, it's not possible to distinguish between a successful query and a silent failure other than by actually reading the output.

To improve on this, facter should produce meaningful exit codes. For backwards compatibility, we're thinking about adding a `--detailed-exitcodes` option. Our questions for the community are: are there other scenarios you'd like to see exit codes better utilized for? And, are there specific codes would you like to see for these scenarios, including our example non-existent fact query?

Thanks!

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William Hopper

Puppet Platform Engineer

[Rob Nelson]

Will, I don't have any specific needs myself but there are probably two other detailed exit codes I can envision. 1) there was a problem calculating the value of the requested fact. 2) there was a problem calculating the value of one or more facts, but at least one fact's value was successfully calculated (most likely when used without a fact name in the argument list). The latter I observed on switch gear where individual facts that were not properly confined would fail to calculate because some unix-ism was not present in the unix-ish OS.

Rob Nelson
rnel...@gmail.com

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