Respect ErrorResults returned from preflight checks

A common pattern in our operators is to use preflight checks to call out to some external system
for more information (that can be written e.g. to the status of the `DeclarativeObject`) or to
validate that some property of the `spec` meets requirements to be able to expand the channel
manifests. If the check fails, sometimes the right behavior is to requeue with backoff - but
often it's not: e.g., if the spec is deemed invalid, there's no reason to requeue the resource.
If spec changes we'll get a new event anyway, and until spec changes we won't be able to reconcile.

There is already a `ErrorResult` type that can be used in a Preflight implementation to signal
what we want the reconciliation function to return, but it's currently not being respected. This
change addresses that.

Author: tomasaschan

pkg/patterns/declarative/reconciler.go

@@ -95,7 +95,11 @@ type ErrorResult struct {
 }
 
 func (e *ErrorResult) Error() string {
-	return e.Err.Error()
+	if e.Err != nil {
+		return e.Err.Error()
+	}
+
+	return ""
 }
 
 // For mocking
@@ -183,6 +187,11 @@ func (r *Reconciler) Reconcile(ctx context.Context, request reconcile.Request) (
 
 	if r.options.status != nil {
 		if err := r.options.status.Preflight(ctx, instance); err != nil {
+			if errorResult, ok := err.(*ErrorResult); ok {
+				// the user was specific about what they wanted to return; respect that
+				return errorResult.Result, errorResult.Err
+			}
+
 			log.Error(err, "preflight check failed, not reconciling")
 			statusInfo.Err = err
 			return result, statusInfo.Err