From: Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org>
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:56:39 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/4] teach wait_or_whine a "quiet" mode
Message-ID: <201103312256.39317.j6t@kdbg.org>
In-Reply-To: <20110331184342.GA16906@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Donnerstag, 31. März 2011, Jeff King wrote:
> The wait_or_whine function will complain to stderr in a few
> cases:
>
>   1. We fail to actually waitpid() correctly.
>
>   2. The child died of a signal.
>
>   3. The child returned exit code 127, indicating a missing
>      command to exec after forking.
>
> We already have a silent_exec_failure flag to silence (3).
> Let's convert that into a "quiet" flag to also silence (2).

I'm rather negative on controlling these two error reports with the same flag 
because...

> This shouldn't result in signal failure being silent for
> existing users of silent_exec_failure, since they already
> will need to be checking the return code and complaining for
> the case of a non-zero exit code.

This reasoning is not correct. Error reporting in the routines in 
run-command.c is structured such that callers have to check the return code, 
but they do not report errors themselves. Therefore, even if callers request 
silent_exec_failure, they will not do their own error reporting if there is 
some other failure.

-- Hannes