On Wed, Aug 16, 2023 at 10:04:28AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
"git help git" does not have "EXIT CODES" section, and it is assumed
that the "common sense" of older generation [...] that exiting with 0
is success and non-zero is failure is shared among its users, which
might not be warranted these days.
well, that's actually a standard (exit(3) has things to say about it),
and given how shell scripts treat exit codes, there is no wiggle room
here. just about every shell intro tutorial explains it.
We could either
* Be more prescriptive and add "EXIT CODES" section to each and
every document to describe how we fail in the current code.
or
* Describe "In general, 0 is success, non-zero is failure, but some
commands may signal more than that with its non-zero exit codes"
in "git help git", and add "EXIT CODES" section to the manual
page of the commands whose exit codes matter (there are a
handful, like "git diff --exit-code" that explicitly says "1" is
the signal that it found difference as opposed to it failing).
i'd go with the second, with some minor modifications:
- 1 is the by far most common non-zero error code (and it matches
EXIT_FAILURE on all relevant systems), so it's ok to state that. it
may be wise to actually check that commands don't deviate from it
needlessly.
- the canonical name of the section appears to be "EXIT STATUS"
regards
