On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 at 16:27, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 08:25:26AM +0100, Martin Ågren wrote:

quoted

No-one looks at the return value, so we might as well drop it. It's
still available as `format->version`.

Hmm. If we have to pick one, I'd say that just returning a sane exit
value would be the more conventional thing to do. But looking at the
callers, many of them want to just pass the struct on to the verify
function.

That said, there is a long-standing curiosity here that we may want to
consider: read_repository_format() does not distinguish between these
three cases:

[snip several valuable insights]

I dunno. This is one of those dark corners of the code where we appear
to do the wrong thing, but nobody seems to have noticed or cared much,
and changing it runs the risk of breaking some obscure cases. I'm not
sure if we should bite the bullet and try to address that, or just back
away slowly and pretend we never looked at it. ;)

That was my reaction when I first dug into this. :-/ It's only now that
I've been brave enough to even try to dig through the first layer.

FWIW, the patch itself seems fine, and obviously doesn't make anything
worse on its own. The question is just whether we want to do more
cleanup here.

Well, if we do want to make more cleanups around here, one of the more
obvious ideas is to actually use the return value. If such a cleanup is
going to start with a (moral) revert of this patch, then we're probably
better off just dropping this patch.

Thanks for your thoughtful response


Martin