From: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:35:03 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] t1401: check symbolic-ref exit codes and --quiet silence
Message-ID: <9b5d2c16-3e95-4e3c-8cd9-9c25842bbb4e@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqbjarqswj.fsf@gitster.g>

On 24/08/2026 19:23, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> writes:
> 
>> I'm still not completely sold that this difference is intentional. As
>> you mentioned elsewhere, in one code path we use `exit(1)` and in the
>> other we use `die(...)` to print an error message, which returs 128. But
>> that to me feels more like nobody noticed that those return different
>> error codes rather than an intentional difference in design, so casting
>> that behaviour into stone with new tests feels wrong to me.
> 
> I tend to agree.  The choice of 1 would have been more about "we
> need to exit with non-zero status" than "we need to use something
> different from what is used by die()".

I'd always assumed the difference was to allow scripts to distinguish 
between an invalid option and the ref not existing, like "git rev-parse 
--quiet --verify" and "git show-ref --quiet --verify".

Thanks

Phillip

> 
>> I'd suggest that we either:
>>
>>    - Continue not checking for the exact error code.
>>
>>    - Adapt the `exit(1)` to instead be `die(NULL)` so that we have the
>>      same error code across both code paths and then verify that both
>>      have the same error code.
> 
> Both sounds very sensible.
> 
> Especially the former to avoid overspecifying what does not matter
> in the end.
> 
> Thanks.
>