On 03/09/2017 06:16 PM, William L. Thomson Jr. wrote:
>
> Case in point dev-db/firebird use to have a line like
>
> rm -rf "${S}"/extern/{btyacc,editline,icu} || die
>
> But if you look at current ebuild it is now
>
> rm -r "${S}"/extern/{btyacc,editline,icu} || die
>
> The force option/argument was dropped. Why? Seems it could have remained.
> Which is why I commented, as I am pretty sure that has been said to me before.
Whether "-f" is appropriate or not depends on the context.
With firebird, you expect all of those directories to exist, and you
want to be notified (so that you can update the ebuild) if one of them
isn't there. If upstream unbundles those three libraries and you're
doing "rm -rf", then you'll never notice, and that (now pointless) line
of code will stay there forever.
In the golang-vcs eclass, you truly don't know that the directory will
exist, so "-f" is needed to avoid a "no such directory" error.
> Essentially do not use -f with || die or something to that effect. Maybe for
> different reasoning. Still one of those things I never liked. Do it this way,
> for this reason, that is not documented. Others may digress and leads to
> confusion.
There's an easy rule: always use "|| die" on commands that don't die
themselves. It's always better to fail as soon as something unexpected
happens. Otherwise it's probably going to fail later anyway, and you'll
waste a whole lot of time trying to figure out why it *really* failed.
There are exceptions to the rule, but it should be really obvious when
you hit one, like if you have a test suite that always returns 1.
