lore deploy silently skips an unloadable manifest and exits 0 #368

lore deploy silently skips a manifest it cannot load, and in the common case exits 0 while having deployed less than the user asked for.

Mechanism

parseLoreDeployConfig loads each @manifest argument at cmd/lore/lore/commands.go:108. When manifest.Load fails it prints to the console and continues:

m, err := manifest.Load(arg[1:])
if err != nil {
    cli.Error("Error reading manifest %q: %v", arg[1:], err)
    continue
}

The error is swallowed at the point it occurs, which is why the function returns nil unconditionally at cmd/lore/lore/commands.go:126 — and why its signature carries //nolint:unparam // error return reserved for future use at cmd/lore/lore/commands.go:89. That comment documents a consequence as though it were an intention. The error return is not reserved for future use; it is dead because a live failure path was downgraded to a log line.

manifest.Load is document.ReadFile[PackagesManifest] (internal/manifest/manifest.go:81), so it fails on a missing file, an unreadable file, a malformed document, or a schema mismatch — all ordinary user errors, including a simple typo in a filename.

Observable failures

1. Silent partial deploy, exit 0.

lore deploy @typo.yaml some-package

typo.yaml is skipped, some-package deploys, len(resolved) != 0, and runDeploy returns nil. The user asked for two things, received one, and the exit code reports success. A CI step wrapping this goes green on a half-completed deploy.

2. Misdiagnosed failure.

lore deploy @typo.yaml

cfg.Packages stays empty and runDeploy returns "no packages to deploy" from cmd/lore/lore/commands.go:81. That is the wrong cause — the manifest failed to load, and that message has already scrolled past. The exit code is correct here; the diagnosis is not.

Scope

Parsing happens before any deployment executes, so aborting on a bad manifest costs the user nothing that has already been done. This is cheap to fix correctly.

Found during the issue #365 audit while reviewing cmd/lore/lore/commands.go for phase 1b. Not folded into that phase: 1b is behavior-preserving decomposition under the #312 discipline, and a semantic fix hidden inside an extract-method diff is exactly what that discipline forbids.

Epic: #446 · Feature: #462