Re: [PATCH 2/3] gc: exit with status 128 on failure

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 03:59:47PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:54:16PM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> 
> > A value of -1 returned from cmd_gc gets propagated to exit(),
> > resulting in an exit status of 255.  Use die instead for a clearer
> > error message and a controlled exit.
> 
> This feels a little funny because we know we're going to turn some of
> these back in the next patch. That said, I'm OK with it, since this
> version is already written.

There's discussion elsewhere[1] of applying just up to patch 2.

Do we still want to convert these cases to die() as their end-state?
Another alternative would be to just convert a "-1" return to 128 or
similar at the level of cmd_gc(), which avoids the 255 weirdness.

Doing so also keeps the error messages the same as (as "error" and not
"fatal"). I'm not sure which we prefer.

It also makes the code more flexible and lib-ifiable (since the caller
can decide how to handle the errors). That probably doesn't matter much
since this is all static-local to builtin/gc.c, though I suppose in
theory we could eventually do parts of "gc --auto" without spawning a
separate process.

-Peff

[1] https://public-inbox.org/git/20180917182210.GB3894@sigill.intra.peff.net/