On Tue, Nov 19, 2024 at 03:54:05PM +0900, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Patrick Steinhardt <ps@xxxxxx> writes: > > The reason why I've been proposing to return negative is because we have > > the idiom of checking `err < 0` in many places, so a function that > > returns a positive value in the case where it didn't return the expected > > result can easily lead to bugs. > > I agree with the general reasoning. I am saying this may or may not > be an error, and if it turns out that it is not an error but is just > one of the generally expected outcome, treating it as an error and > having "if (status < 0)" to lump the case together with other error > cases may not be nice to the callers. The question to me is whether the function returns something sensible in all non-error cases that a caller can use properly without having to explicitly check for the value. And I'd say that this is not the case with `refs_read_symbolic_ref()`, which wouldn't end up setting the value of `referent`. So regardless of whether we define this as error or non-error, the caller would have to exlicitly handle the case where it's not a symref in order to make sense of it because the result is not well-defined. Patrick
