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

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 11:40:12AM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

> > 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?
> 
> IMHO yes, we do.  die() is the function that you can use to exit with
> a fatal error.
> 
> If we want to get rid of die(), that would be a tree-wide effort, not
> something that should hold up this patch.

But that was sort of my question. I think there are people who _do_ want
to get rid of most die() calls (like Dscho), and there is a tree-wide
effort that is happening slowly to lib-ify. Your patch goes in the
opposite direction.

That said, I think there are actually two cases in your patch.

The calls to "return error()" or even just "return -1" in cmd_gc() seem
like obvious candidates for die(). We're at the top of the stack, and
anybody lib-ifying at that level is going to need to extract bits into
reusable functions anyway.

I more wondered about helpers like report_last_gc_error() and
gc_before_repack().

> > 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,
> 
> Exactly.  I'm a strong believer in http://wiki.c2.com/?YouArentGonnaNeedIt.

I only half-agree that this is YAGNI. If it were "let's punt on making
this code friendlier to lib-ification", I'd agree more completely. But
it's actually taking an active step in the opposite direction.

I dunno. It's probably not worth spending too much more time discussing,
and I'm OK either way.  I mostly just wanted to raise the issue since
dropping patch 3 changes the balance to me.

-Peff