Re: [PATCH] Improved and extended t5404

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 11:18:01PM -0500, Jeff King wrote:

> My goal with the recent patches is that _any_ failure will cause a non-0
> exit code (but you have to read the stderr output to find out which, if
> any, refs were successful).

BTW, since there seems to be some debate on how this _should_ work, I
think the "signal failure if anything failed" approach is the better.

Why?

Because either way you do it, there is an ambiguity, and I would rather
that ambiguity lie with the "failure" case. If I see exit code '0', I
_know_ that all of my refs were updated. If I see exit code '1', then
there was some failure detected, but my refs might or might not have
been updated. But that ambiguity _already_ exists. Consider the case
where we send refs, but the connection dies in the middle. We have to
signal error, then, but for all we know the other side was about to
"successfully updated all refs". So you can only ever _know_ success,
and with failure, you simply guess (and presumably retry).

-Peff