Exit status for runtask should be 1 if task outcome is FAILED?

[Róman Joost]

Dear Kamil,

thanks for your prompt reply.

On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 05:21:44AM -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'd like to enquire if it's desired to let runtask exit with '1' if the
> > task in question has a 'FAILED' outcome.
> > 
> > Maybe there was a conscious decision of not providing this feature and
> > I'd like to hear about it.
> > 
> > I've joined Taskotron on phabricator. If there are no obvious
> > resentments against such an idea, I'm happy to create a task and
> > implement it.
> > 
> > Kind Regards,
> > --
> > Róman Joost
> 
Moved this up, since I have not explained my motivation in my initial
post:

> Why exactly do you need this? For local testing? runtask is just an execution wrapper, so you should be able to run your `./script some args` the same way as `runtask -i item -t type script.yml`. Except for some set up steps (like 'koji' or 'bodhi' directive), so if you use some of these, I can see a reason why you would want to run it through runtask.
That's exactly why I thought about runtask. To be more precise, we're
currently working on rpmgrill. It ships it's own fetch-build script
which is currently tied to Fedoras Koji.

IMHO rpmgrill shouldn't be concerned about where the builds come from.
If I can use 'runtask' to fetch the builds, let rpmgrill handle the
analysis and report back to bodhi or any other similar system that would
be very beneficial. Furthermore that can run easily in a Jenkins and the
exit status would provide a way for the CI to figure if the package is
not shipping with nasty problems.

> Hey Róman,
> 
> thanks for joining the project and welcome :)
> 
> We have never really thought about the feature you're talking about. We currently return non-zero in case the execution fails - ctrl+c, an exception thrown. If we wanted to extend it to the FAILED task result, I see the following issues:
> 
> 1. We have other outcomes defined at the moment, like NEEDS_INSPECTION:
> https://docs.qadevel.cloud.fedoraproject.org/libtaskotron/latest/library.html#libtaskotron.check.CheckDetail
> What should happen in that case?
Theoretically it'll be an exit code 1 as well. What I don't know
tho is, if it's practical to change it to 1. Perhaps it would mean that
currently all packages which are under test would basically 'fail'. You
might have a better insight here what the consequences of that change
would be.


> 2. Some tasks do not check just a single item. For example, depcheck and upgradepath check everything that is currently proposed for stable or testing updates. They can return a dozen test results. What should happen when there are mixed results?
I'd assume to default to the worst result. So if any one of them has a
a FAILED state it means exit with 1. What I'm not sure about is if it's
currently easy to accumulate the worst result case with the current
code. Might be easier thought than done.


> 3. At the moment, it's technically possible to leave out the 'resultsdb' directive the from task recipe. I cannot imagine a use case for this, because in development mode, this only reports to stdout, but it's possible if you need it. If we wanted to inspect task outcomes, we need to do it from TAP, therefore in the 'resultsdb' directive. It might be confusing to people that if you commented out that directive, runtask would stop returning "correct" return codes.
IMHO that's the beauty of Taskotron being decoupled from the execution
and the result reporting. My main idea was just using libtaskotron for
task execution and perhaps in the future to report to other aggregation
systems inside Red Hat (the equivalent to Bodhi).

So I thought from a developer point of view, it allows to run build
analysers against your package in your CI using Taskotron without the
need to report the results back into a results database.

I hope I'm not twisting the intention of the whole Taskotron idea.

> One further thought, instead of implementing this by default, we can
> also create a new directive or variable which will allow task creators
> to set the exit code, according to TAP or any other logic they want.
That sounds like a good idea as well. Based on that, what we could also
do is, add an argument to runtask like:

    --make-fatal

which means if the result of the runtask is not PASSED or INFO it'll
exit with 1. Less flexible than your idea, but perhaps less work
involved.

Kind Regards,
-- 
Róman Joost
Software Engineer, PnT DevOps - Developer (Brisbane)
email: rjoost at redhat.com | tz: UTC+10 | GPG ID: 0xBE2B559D at pgp.mit.edu
irc: #pnt-devops #rpmdiff
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