Re: [PATCH v5 1/4] object-name: make get_oid quietly return an error

> Almost everybody else in this function hits "return -1" after
> detecting that it cannot yield a valid object name, and this change
> makes the oddball case do the same.
> 
> Ideally in a distant past, we might want to remove this _GENTLY
> flag, together with the code path that is not so gentle, and adjust
> the callers that depend on the current behaviour (which I somehow
> doubt--- they need to be prepared to deal with the error return from
> other parts of the same function already).  We might need to make it
> possible for callers to tell which error condition we got (e.g., did
> the input give it a non-existing ref?  did reflog walk run out?),
> but these (including to the change to just lose "die" and always go
> the GENTLY code path) are totally outside the scope of this series.