diff: drop useless return from run_diff_{files,index} functions

Neither of these functions ever returns a value other than zero.
Instead, they expect unrecoverable errors to exit immediately, and
things like "--exit-code" are stored inside the diff_options struct to
be handled later via diff_result_code().

Some callers do check the return values, but many don't bother. Let's
drop the useless return values, which are misleading callers about how
the functions work. This could be seen as a step in the wrong direction,
as we might want to eventually "lib-ify" these to more cleanly return
errors up the stack, in which case we'd have to add the return values
back in. But there are some benefits to doing this now:

  1. In the current code, somebody could accidentally add a "return -1"
     to one of the functions, which would be erroneously ignored by many
     callers. By removing the return code, the compiler can notice the
     mismatch and force the developer to decide what to do.

     Obviously the other option here is that we could start consistently
     checking the error code in every caller. But it would be dead code,
     and we wouldn't get any compile-time help in catching new cases.

  2. It communicates the situation to callers, who may want to choose a
     different function. These functions are really thin wrappers for
     doing git-diff-files and git-diff-index within the process. But
     callers who care about recovering from an error here are probably
     better off using the underlying library functions, many of
     which do return errors.

If somebody eventually wants to teach these functions to propagate
errors, they'll have to switch back to returning a value, effectively
reverting this patch. But at least then they will be starting with a
level playing field: they know that they will need to inspect each
caller to see how it should handle the error.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/diff.h b/diff.h
index 260c454155..528f00d5e1 100644
--- a/diff.h
+++ b/diff.h
@@ -637,11 +637,11 @@ void diff_get_merge_base(const struct rev_info *revs, struct object_id *mb);
 #define DIFF_SILENT_ON_REMOVED 01
 /* report racily-clean paths as modified */
 #define DIFF_RACY_IS_MODIFIED 02
-int run_diff_files(struct rev_info *revs, unsigned int option);
+void run_diff_files(struct rev_info *revs, unsigned int option);
 
 #define DIFF_INDEX_CACHED 01
 #define DIFF_INDEX_MERGE_BASE 02
-int run_diff_index(struct rev_info *revs, unsigned int option);
+void run_diff_index(struct rev_info *revs, unsigned int option);
 
 int do_diff_cache(const struct object_id *, struct diff_options *);
 int diff_flush_patch_id(struct diff_options *, struct object_id *, int);