Re: [PATCH] reset cached ident date before creating objects

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Aug 01, 2016 at 02:12:34PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

> Before I switched to "reset at the beginning" in my original patch, I
> also noticed this issue, but decided the other way: to only reset after
> a successful creation.
> 
> I think in most cases it wouldn't matter anyway, because the caller will
> generally abort as soon as this returns failure anyway. But I wondered
> about something like:
> 
>   author = prepare_author_info();
>   if (commit_tree_extended(..., author, ...) < 0) {
> 	/* oops, we failed. Do a thing and try again. */
> 	possible_fix();
> 	if (commit_tree_extended(..., author, ...) < 0)
> 		die("giving up");
>   }
> 
> In the second call (but only the second call!) the committer and author
> can diverge.

To be clear, I checked all of the callers and nobody actually does this.
Every caller proceeds straight to a die() except the one in
notes_cache_write(), which silently ignores error (which is the correct
thing to do).

This is more "it seems like a fragile pattern to me".

-Peff