Re: [PATCH 5/9] merge-recursive: avoid returning a wholesale struct

Hi Junio,

On Wed, 29 Jun 2016, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

It is technically allowed, as per C89, for functions' return type to
be complete structs (i.e. *not* just pointers to structs), but it is
bad practice.

Not necessarily.

Okay, I fixed it.

quoted

This is a very late attempt to contain the damage done by this developer
in 6d297f8 (Status update on merge-recursive in C, 2006-07-08) which
introduced such a return type.

It will also help the current effort to libify merge-recursive.c, as
it will allow us to return proper error codes later.

But this part of the motivation does make sense.  Having to pass an
extra int &error_code field, only because the return value is
already used for something else, is a lot more weird.

While I still think it is inelegant to return a whole struct
(understanding the machine code aspects of it), I toned it down to say
that we just do not use that construct in Git's source code. And I kept
the paragraph that you found more convincing, of course.

Ciao,
Dscho

P.S.: If it is not too much of a problem, may I ask you to simply delete
remainders of my patches when replying and not commenting on them? I just
deleted 226 lines after verifying that you really did not respond to any
part of it in the unhelpful Alpine client (which I still use because it
*still* fits much better with my workflow than anything else, by a lot).
Again, not a big deal if it would make your life more painful.