Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> writes: > Is it lazy to omit the `< 0` here? Not actually, the reason why I omitted > it here was to stay under 80 columns per line. > > Good eyes, though. If `paint_down_to_common()` _did_ return values other > than -1 and 0, in particular positive ones that would not indicate a fatal > error, the hunk under discussion would have introduced a problematic bug. The same patch does compare the returned value with '< 0' in another function (that is far from this place), which probably made the hunk stand out during a review, I suspect. After having fixed a bug elsewhere about a codepath that mixed the "non-zero is an error" and "negative is an error" conventions during the last cycle, I would have to say that being consistent would be nice. I think we at the end decided to make the callee be more strict (returning negative to signal an error) while allowing the caller to be more lenient (taking non-zero as an error) in that case. Thanks.
