Re: [RFC PATCH 0/1] config: surface editor failure in exit code

On 2026-08-18 at 14:31:05, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Karthik Nayak [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Wouldn't it be better to notify the user that something went wrong
rather than simply brush it off?

If we were adding 'git config -e' today, absolutely.  The issue is
not the comparison between signaling with an exit code and not
doing so.  The question is whether the benefit or conceptual
correctness outweighs any possible downside of changing the
behavior existing users have grown accustomed to.

Having said that, 'git config -e' is relatively new, introduced in
commit 3cbace5ee0 (builtin/config: introduce "edit" subcommand,
2024-05-06).  The folks who may be affected are those who used
'git config -e' in their scripts and carefully checked the exit
status (or rather, lazily used 'set -e'), and did so in the past
two years.  So the fallout might not be so great.

I think we should propagate the error code.  Other than ed(1) and POSIX
vi(1) implementations, editors only exit nonzero when there's an error.
If someone's scripting, then most of the major programming languages
should not exit nonzero unless something seriously went wrong or the
user requested a nonzero exit code, in which case they wanted the
process to abort.

I would actually argue that people might be ignoring errors with `set
-e` that they intended to catch just because they're not getting a
nonzero status code.
-- 
brian m. carlson (they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA