Use anyhow::Result as error type?

[dfreese]

It looks like much of what happens with the SdError type is adding context to an underlying error. I've used anyhow, and found it super useful for this sort of pattern; particularly using the Context trait.

Is this something you would be open to? I can open up an example PR if it would make it more concrete.

[lucab]

Thanks for the report. I agree that the way we are currently using thiserror and how we add context details in intermediate layers resembles anyhow a lot. However this is a library crate so thiserror is still a better fit compared to anyhow: https://github.com/dtolnay/thiserror#comparison-to-anyhow. Specifically, I do make use of the features listed at https://github.com/dtolnay/thiserror#details, in the sense that thiserror details do not appear in libsystemd API.

If you are annoyed (and rightly so!) by all the map_err() + format!() sprinkled through the codebase, I think a better course of action is to add a pub(crate) fn with_context() to SdError. That way adding intermediate context become less verbose, and we get most of the benefits of anyhow while still properly using thiserror.

[dfreese]

Absolutely makes sense. Wanted to check before looking into changing the handling of errors, since anyhow would be the easiest way of doing that. I'll update #128 to use a custom Context for SdError.