Fatal error from display suite calling taxonomy_term_view() and passing an empty value as a term object.

Should maybe look like:

      else {
        $term = taxonomy_term_load($item['tid']);
        if (!empty($term)) {
          $build = taxonomy_term_view($term, $view_mode, $langcode);
        }
        else {
          $build['#markup'] = '';
        }
      }

You think I should open an issue against core for taxonomy_term_view()?

I do feel like that it's DS's responsibility to use the core API correctly, even if it's awkward that the API doesn't let you reliably put "load" straight into "view".

Maybe there should be two open issues for this?

Also, shouldn't fatal errors for a common use-case be major? It's not exactly unlikely that you would want to display a term rendered by a view and also be allowed to delete terms.

I'm using Views to display a "full rendered term" for a term referenced by a product line item in commerce, there's no nodes involved, it's a field in Views.

It seems that Views gets the tid from the query it builds and blindly sends it off to be rendered with the default view mode for taxonomy terms.

From https://drupal.org/node/45111

Issues which have significant repercussions but do not render the whole system unusable are marked major. An example would be a PHP error which is only triggered under rare circumstances or which affects only a small percentage of all users. These issues are prioritized in the current development release and backported to stable releases where applicable. Major issues do not block point releases.

This issue is perfectly described by the example in the formal definition of major issues ;)