To aid forward compatibility, the driver in a number of situations does not validate e.g. operation parameters, passing them to the server verbatim as they are given by client code, and relying on the server to produce an error. While this permits the server to add functionality in the future and existing driver versions to support this functionality transparently, this also delays error reporting and makes it more difficult to troubleshoot actual errors.

The lint mode allows application (and our test suite) to request that certain validations be done by the driver based on the current server behavior. This way the failures are reported earlier, sometimes much earlier, in the operation lifetime.

The functionality is already implemented; this ticket is for documenting the environment variable that turns it on in user-facing documentation.