An invalid entry in .linkconfig prevents Link from establishing a Link, but it does not add "Error" to the message

[aplteam]

The only way to establish whether Link encountered a problem is to do a text analysis of the result. So far, it appeared that I could rely on looking for the string "ERRORS ENCOUNTERED" in the result returned by Link's Create function, but that is not quite true.

I got <Unknown Debug options in "/path/2/.linkconfig": NOTIFY> despite the fact that no Link was established.

It should use "ERRORS ENCOUNTERED". Even better would be the return of proper numeric return codes indicating success (0) or failure (any positive integer).

To Reproduce

I accidentally hat a file .linkconfig that reads:

{
  LinkVersion: { ID: "4.0.17"},

  Settings: {    
  },
  Debug: {
	NOTIFY: 1,
  },
}

That stops Cider from working properly.

I am on:

Dyalog  19.0.49376 64-bit Unicode, BuildID 384d265e 
 OS      Windows 11 (10.0.22631) 64-bit              
 Link    4.0.17                                      
 SALT    2.915                                       
 UCMD    2.6                                         
 .NET    .NET Framework 4.8.9241.0                   
 WS      19.0                                        
 Tatin   0.108.2-beta-3                              
 Cider   0.40.1                                      

[aplteam]

I object to ranking this as low. To this day, the only way to find out whether a command was executed successfully is by analyzing the message returned; Link neither throws an error nor gives back a return code. That's why having "Error" within the message returned is essential.