Re: [PATCH] reset cached ident date before creating objects

On Mon, Aug 01, 2016 at 02:12:34PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

Before I switched to "reset at the beginning" in my original patch, I
also noticed this issue, but decided the other way: to only reset after
a successful creation.

I think in most cases it wouldn't matter anyway, because the caller will
generally abort as soon as this returns failure anyway. But I wondered
about something like:

  author = prepare_author_info();
  if (commit_tree_extended(..., author, ...) < 0) {
	/* oops, we failed. Do a thing and try again. */
	possible_fix();
	if (commit_tree_extended(..., author, ...) < 0)
		die("giving up");
  }

In the second call (but only the second call!) the committer and author
can diverge.

To be clear, I checked all of the callers and nobody actually does this.
Every caller proceeds straight to a die() except the one in
notes_cache_write(), which silently ignores error (which is the correct
thing to do).

This is more "it seems like a fragile pattern to me".

-Peff