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From: J <dreadpiratejeff@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2013 18:24:44 -0500
Subject: Is there a more elegant way to handle determing fail status?
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Ok, so I have a diagnostic tool, written by someone else. That tool
runs a series of small tests defined by the user and can simplified
summary output that can be one of the following:

FAILED_CRITICAL
FAILED_HIGH
FAILED_MEDIUM
FAILED_LOW
PASSED

I also have a wrapper script I wrote to run these tests, summarize the
results of all tests aggregated and then fail based on a particular
fail level.

The idea is that if I run 3 tests with the diagnostic tool and it
tells me the following:

testA: PASSED
testB: FAILED_MEDIUM
testC: PASSED

AND I told the wrapper to only fail on HIGH or above, the wrapper will
tell me that I had a medium failure, but the wrapper will still exit
with a 0 (success)

if I get the same results as above, but tell the wrapper to fail on
LOW, then it will tell me I had that medium failure, but the wrapper
will exit with a 1 (failure).

The problem is that my exit determination looks like this:

    if fail_priority == fail_levels['FAILED_CRITICAL']:
        if critical_fails:
            return 1
    if fail_priority == fail_levels['FAILED_HIGH']:
        if critical_fails or high_fails:
            return 1
    if fail_priority == fail_levels['FAILED_MEDIUM']:
        if critical_fails or high_fails or medium_fails:
            return 1
    if fail_priority == fail_levels['FAILED_LOW']:
        if critical_fails or high_fails or medium_fails or low_fails:
            return 1

    return 0

So, to explain the above... the fail level can be set by the user when
running the wrapper using -f (or it defaults to 'high')
the wrapper assigns a number to each level using this:

    # Set correct fail level
    args.fail_level = 'FAILED_%s' % args.fail_level.upper()

    # Get our failure priority and create the priority values
    fail_levels = {'FAILED_CRITICAL':4,
                   'FAILED_HIGH':3,
                   'FAILED_MEDIUM':2,
                   'FAILED_LOW':1}
    fail_priority = fail_levels[args.fail_level]

the variables critical_fails, high_fails, medium_fails, low_fails are
all counters that are etiher None, or the number of tests that were
failed.

So using this output from the diagnostic tool:

testA: PASSED
testB: FAILED_HIGH
testC: PASSED
testD: FAILED_MEDIUM
testE: PASSED

critical_fails would be None
high_fails would be 1
medium_fails would be 1
low_fails would be None.

The exit code determination above works, but it just feels inelegant.
It feels like there's a better way of implementing that, but I can't
come up with one that still honors the fail level properly (e.g. other
solutions will fail on medium, but won't fail properly on medium OR
higher).

I can provide the full script if necessary, if the above isn't enough
to point me in a direction that has a better way of doing this...

Thanks for looking,

Jeff