Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: >> * We alternatively could fix individual sign_buffer() backend that >> signals an error with a positive value (sign_buffer_ssh() in this >> case) to return a negative value, but this would hopefully be >> more future-proof. > > FWIW, I would have gone the other way, and fixed sign_buffer_ssh(). Your > solution here is future-proofing the tag code against other > sign_buffer_*() functions behaving like ssh. But it is also leaving > other sign_buffer() callers to introduce the same bug. > > Your documentation change at least makes that less likely. But given how > much of our code uses the "negative is error" convention, I wouldn't be > surprised to see it happen anyway. Yeah, but other callers are prepared to honor the current return value convention used by gpg-interface, so "fixing" sign_buffer_ssh() would not give us any future-proofing. We could do belt and suspenders by tightening the other callers to only expect negative for errors (but then what should they do when they receive non-zero positive? Should they BUG() out???) while teaching sign_buffer_ssh() that our convention is to return negative for an error, of course, but I am not sure if it that is worth it. Thanks.
