Re: RFC: error codes on exit

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: May 20, 2021, 01:19 UTC
Message-ID: <60a5b9165fd5b_1e27520848@natae.notmuch>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqeee2w7ov.fsf@gitster.g>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> > In order to do this, I would like to annotate "exit" events with a
> > classification of the error.
> 
> We already have BUG() for e. and die() for everything else, and
> "everything else" may be overly broad for your purpose.

BUG() and die() can call fatal().

> I am sympathetic to the cause and I agree that introducing a
> finer-grained classification might be a solution.  I however am not
> sure how we can enforce developers to apply such a manually assigned
> "error code" cosistently.

You don't enforce developers to do this--just like you don't enforce developers to use advice() instead of fprintf(stderr, )... You nudge them in that direction, and eventually it becomes a habit.

Developers in other languages and stacks have no problem with this granularity. They do this in languages like JavaScript, C++, Ruby and Python regularlly. And developers dealing with HTTP have no trouble with error codes (like 200, 400, and 404).

-- 
Felipe Contreras