# Error reporting in git

2024-07-23

`BUG`, `bug`, `die`, `usage`, `error`, and `warning` report errors of various kinds.

- `BUG` is for failed internal assertions that should never happen, i.e. a bug in git itself.

- `bug` (lower-case, not `BUG`) is supposed to be used like `BUG` but prints a "BUG" message instead of calling `abort()`.

  A call to `bug()` will then result in a "real" call to the `BUG()` function, either explicitly by invoking `BUG_if_bug()` after call(s) to `bug()`, or implicitly at `exit()` time where we’ll check if we encountered any outstanding `bug()` invocations.

  If there were no prior calls to `bug()` before invoking `BUG_if_bug()` the latter is a NOOP. The `BUG_if_bug()` function takes the same arguments as `BUG()` itself. Calling `BUG_if_bug()` explicitly isn’t necessary, but ensures that we die as soon as possible.

  If you know you had prior calls to `bug()` then calling `BUG()` itself is equivalent to calling `BUG_if_bug()`, the latter being a wrapper calling `BUG()` if we’ve set a flag indicating that we’ve called `bug()`.

  This is for the convenience of APIs who’d like to potentially report more than one "bug", such as the optbug() validation in parse-options.c.

- `die` is for fatal application errors. It prints a message to the user and exits with status 128.

- `usage` is for errors in command line usage. After printing its message, it exits with status 129. (See also `usage_with_options` in the parse-options API.)

- `error` is for non-fatal library errors. It prints a message to the user and returns -1 for convenience in signaling the error to the caller.

- `warning` is for reporting situations that probably should not occur but which the user (and Git) can continue to work around without running into too many problems. Like `error`, it returns -1 after reporting the situation to the caller.

These reports will be logged via the trace2 facility. See the "error" event in trace2 API.

## Customizable error handlers

The default behavior of `die` and `error` is to write a message to stderr and then exit or return as appropriate. This behavior can be overridden using `set_die_routine` and `set_error_routine`. For example, "git daemon" uses set_die_routine to write the reason `die` was called to syslog before exiting.

## Library errors

Functions return a negative integer on error. Details beyond that vary from function to function:

- Some functions return -1 for all errors. Others return a more specific value depending on how the caller might want to react to the error.

- Some functions report the error to stderr with `error`, while others leave that for the caller to do.

- errno is not meaningful on return from most functions (except for thin wrappers for system calls).

Check the function’s API documentation to be sure.

## Caller-handled errors

An increasing number of functions take a parameter struct strbuf *err. On error, such functions append a message about what went wrong to the err strbuf. The message is meant to be complete enough to be passed to `die` or `error` as-is. For example:

    if (ref_transaction_commit(transaction, &err))
            die("%s", err.buf);

The err parameter will be untouched if no error occurred, so multiple function calls can be chained:

    t = ref_transaction_begin(&err);
    if (!t ||
        ref_transaction_update(t, "HEAD", ..., &err) ||
        ret_transaction_commit(t, &err))
            die("%s", err.buf);

The err parameter must be a pointer to a valid strbuf. To silence a message, pass a strbuf that is explicitly ignored:

    if (thing_that_can_fail_in_an_ignorable_way(..., &err))
            /* This failure is okay. */
            strbuf_reset(&err);