From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:31:41 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] t/test-lib.sh: Let test_must_fail fail on signals only
Message-ID: <7vlk01komq.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080717060143.GA3338@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

>> I would however agree that when we do mean 255 we should probably write
>> 255, not (-1).  It is easier to document things that way.
>
> I started to fix the callsites that Stephan mentioned, but it really is
> convenient to be able to 'return error("foo")' (or even return
> func_that_calls_error(), and tracking down deep calls is time consuming
> and error prone). So maybe we should just enhance the change from
> 2488df84 and special case "-1" into "1"?

Didn't the patch to testsuite that triggered this thread talk about "small
negative integer" not "-1"?  I suspect there might be other negative
return values from cmd_foo(), although I haven't checked.

Is it that somebody do not want 255 exit value, or anything that has 7th
bit set?  2488df8 (builtin run_command: do not exit with -1., 2007-11-13)
suggests otherwise at least for Windows runtime, so what we currently have
that does extra truncation ourselves might be sufficient.