Concern about new g-b-s logging change - loss of error detection

[Max Bowsher]

Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Oct 2005, Max Bowsher wrote:
>
>> Please forgive me if this has already been discussed - I've been
>> time-limited to scanning subject lines only recently.
>>
>> Bourne shells consider only the exit status of the last command in a
>> pipeline when determining $? - this means that the addition of lots of
>> "| tee somefile" will cause errors occurring during the commands being
>> logged to be ignored.
>>
>> This seems to me to be a more severe problem than not keeping the logs
>> in the first place - as a failing "make" could result in the packaging
>> of a partially built package.
>
> Max,
>
> Thanks for bringing this up.  This hasn't been discussed, and I admit I
> missed this aspect of the problem when reviewing the patch.  I did have a
> fleeting thought of changing the "tee"s to redirections, but didn't
> realize the importance of this.  I just verified that even with "set -e"
> in effect, bash will not terminate if an interior pipe command fails.
>
> I can think of two ways to tackle this: use redirection (with the loss of
> immediate console output),

I don't like that idea. When building a large package, this would mean many 
minutes without any feedback at all.

> or use $PIPESTATUS (which is a bashism, and is
> fragile, unless we use ${PIPESTATUS[$((${#PIPESTATUS[@]}-1))]}).

I think using a bashism is OK. Even people who don't actually use bash 
interactively will have it installed - it's in 'Base', after all.

Why would ${PIPESTATUS[1]} not be OK?

Max.