run_command: report system call errors instead of returning error codes

The motivation for this change is that system call failures are serious
errors that should be reported to the user, but only few callers took the
burden to decode the error codes that the functions returned into error
messages.

If at all, then only an unspecific error message was given. A prominent
example is this:

   $ git upload-pack . | :
   fatal: unable to run 'git-upload-pack'

In this example, git-upload-pack, the external command invoked through the
git wrapper, dies due to SIGPIPE, but the git wrapper does not bother to
report the real cause. In fact, this very error message is copied to the
syslog if git-daemon's client aborts the connection early.

With this change, system call failures are reported immediately after the
failure and only a generic failure code is returned to the caller. In the
above example the error is now to the point:

   $ git upload-pack . | :
   error: git-upload-pack died of signal

Note that there is no error report if the invoked program terminated with
a non-zero exit code, because it is reasonable to expect that the invoked
program has already reported an error. (But many run_command call sites
nevertheless write a generic error message.)

There was one special return code that was used to identify the case where
run_command failed because the requested program could not be exec'd. This
special case is now treated like a system call failure with errno set to
ENOENT. No error is reported in this case, because the call site in git.c
expects this as a normal result. Therefore, the callers that carefully
decoded the return value still check for this condition.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 5 deletions

diff --git a/git.c b/git.c
index d223eab62f..03726eee5e 100644
--- a/git.c
+++ b/git.c
@@ -417,12 +417,8 @@ static void execv_dashed_external(const char **argv)
 	 * OK to return. Otherwise, we just pass along the status code.
 	 */
 	status = run_command_v_opt(argv, 0);
-	if (status != -ERR_RUN_COMMAND_EXEC) {
-		if (status < 0)
-			die("unable to run '%s'", argv[0]);
+	if (status >= 0 || errno != ENOENT)
 		exit(status);
-	}
-	errno = ENOENT; /* as if we called execvp */
 
 	argv[0] = tmp;