No easy way to detect formatting problems

[kirasglimmer]

hostess -n fmt does not affect exit codes if there is a formatting problem. For example, my hosts file has 2 contrived duplicates:

duplicate hostname entry for test -> 127.0.0.1
duplicate hostname entry for kubernetes.docker.internal -> 127.0.0.1

When I run sudo hostess -n fmt, it reports:

~: hostess -n fmt
duplicate hostname entry for test -> 127.0.0.1
duplicate hostname entry for kubernetes.docker.internal -> 127.0.0.1
... remainder redacted for security ...

Then, echo $? reports 0:

~: echo $?
0

I would expect the exit code to be non-zero when there are duplicates to make automation with hostess easier. Non-zero exit codes were working in earlier versions (pre 0.4.0), and as such, our automation scripts have broken.

[cbednarski]

Thanks for the report! Apologies for the change in behavior here. I did not have test coverage for exit codes so I did not catch this change, but I have started adding test coverage to the frontend so I should be able to specify this behavior and make sure it sticks going forward.

I'd like to get your feedback on expectations here. My expectation is in the case of a dupe (not a collision) and -n is not passed, we can fix the dupe and move on (soft error / warning), as in #39. I think this is reasonable since in the case of a duplicate the fix is deterministic.

To satisfy your case, I can further specify that in the case of a dupe and -n is specified this becomes a hard error.

A collision (same hostname pointing to two different IPs) will always be a hard error because I can't choose the correct IP for you.

[kirasglimmer]

Thanks.

It seems reasonable that if -n is not passed, then a 0 exit code is acceptable since hostess will be fixing the file. So, as long as hostess is able to successfully do that (i.e., it was run with sudo hostess fmt), then a 0 seems correct.

If -n is passed, then any type of duplicate should result in an exit code. If you want to vary the exit code (say a -1 for duplicate name, same IP, and a -2 for same hostname, different IPs), that also makse sense. Our base requirement is just a non-zero exit code for any type of duplicate.

[cbednarski]

@DacheW This should now be fixed in version 0.5.2. Thanks again for the report!