Re: Lilypond error behaviour

[David Kastrup]

Sharon Rosner <address@hidden> writes:

>> What's wrong with the exit code?  I thought people rather complained
>> about the error message.
>
> For the given examples, the non-zero exit code signifies failure, when
> lilypond has actually completed its task - generating a PDF -
> successfully.

Uh, LilyPond was not tasked with generating "a PDF" but rather a PDF
_corresponding_ to the input (not just loosely inspired by it).  It did
not complete this task successfully.

The antithesis is the file

{ }

which is a valid LilyPond file processed successfully without generating
any PDF file.

More exactly, LilyPond's task is to read a LilyPond input file and
process its contained expression according to the setting of hook
variables (those may do something other than typesetting, for example
converting to a MusicXML expression and writing it out again).  Some
processing may result in files being generated (including PDF files).
But the generation of PDF files is a side effect.  It does not have a
relation to the occurence of errors.

> And this goes hand in hand with the misleading message “fatal error”,
> when in fact Lilypond has reported the syntax errors and merrily
> continued both parsing the input file and generating the output.

> So which was it, failure or success?

Failure.

-- 
David Kastrup