Re: [PATCH 2/7] object.c: make type_from_string() return "enum object_type"

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 8, 2021, 21:48 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq1rcp5nbk.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <20210308200426.21824-3-avarab@gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason  <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> Change the type_from_string*() functions to return an "enum
> object_type", and refactor their callers to check for "== OBJ_BAD"
> instead of "< 0".
>
> This helps to distinguish code in object.c where we really do return
> -1 from code that returns an "enum object_type", whose OBJ_BAD happens
> to be -1.

"We will be adding different error modes and the plan is to signal them by returning negative values other than -1" would make sense (if that is what we are going to see in the remainder of the series), but not the above.

To the callees, what comes back from a function is -1 either way, and they cannot tell -1 resulting from OBJ_BAD and -1 resulting from error() apart, can they?