[xml/sgml-pkgs] Bug#676717: dh_installcatalogs transition and w3c-dtd-xhtml removal bugs

[Helmut Grohne]

On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 10:29:29PM +0900, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> This is non-essential but I thought it may be good idea not to make
> postinst script robust.  As it is written now, any non-zero exit code of
> update-catalog will break postinst script.

This is somewhat intentional. If update-catalog breaks, then something
really is broken and should fail loudly.

> Why not like:
>        update-catalog --quiet --update-super ||
>        echo "SGML catalog is broken. Read /usr/share/doc/sgml-base/README.trouble." 1>&2

This would hide failures to write the super catalog and cause very nasty
failures as we have seen in the past.

> FYI: I did not understand why this script returns 
>  * 1=error for normal errors, 
>  * 0=non-error for goods and 
>  * -1=error (for shell this 255) for --help and --version. 
> The last type was not expected.

I think that update-catalog never had a useful distinction between 1 and
-1. For instance it runs into both printing a usage sometimes. (--help
causes -1, --doesnotexist causes 1) Note that a "die" results in -1.

What kind of failures are "normal errors"? Which failures would you like
not to be loud?

Helmut