Besides having dry-run support, I think this gets to the question of what the level of abstraction should be, and I think that is clearly application-specific.

Besides having dry-run support, I think this gets to the question of what the level of abstraction should be, and I think that is clearly application-specific. Maybe in your case the level you are trying to report dry-run information at is too granular. Or maybe you have too tight coupling between your code that determines what needs to be changed and that which actually does the change and you might want to refactor the code that determines changes to the code that makes the changes.