[pacman-dev] [PATCHv3 5/7] pacsearch: skip any non-matching line instead of printing them

[Allan McRae]

On 11/02/14 10:23, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
> On 14-02-11 10:12:04, Allan McRae wrote:
>> On 11/02/14 02:23, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
>>> On 14-02-10 11:06:51, Andrew Gregory wrote:
>>>> On 02/09/14 at 07:41pm, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
>>>>> If input cannot be parsed, it is not desirable to output it along other valid
>>>>> entries. This would make pacsearch output unpredictable.
>>>>>
>>>>> Signed-off-by: Pierre Neidhardt <ambrevar at gmail.com>
>>>>> ---
>>>>>  contrib/pacsearch.in | 7 ++-----
>>>>>  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
>>>>
>>>> -1.  pacsearch is a thin pacman wrapper and should not hide output.
>>>> Since it doesn't do any real argument parsing, a user can pass an
>>>> option that alters pacman's output (-q for instance) and this would
>>>> hide all output from the user without giving any indication of an
>>>> error.
>>>
>>> Then I suggest to print a message to stderr instead, since outputing unparseable
>>> lines among the regular output can introdcue subtle bugs in programs using
>>> pacsearch output.
>>>
>>
>> Do you have an example with unparsable output?
> 
> Yes, as aforementioned by Andrew:
> 
>   pacsearch -q pacman
> 
> Here -q is seen as an option, not a package. Same thing with -v, and so on.
> 
> Otherwise, we could just add '--' before 'ARGV', this would prevent this issue
> and then 'unparseable output' would never happen.
> 

That does not seem a bad option.

A