glib/docs
Simon McVittie e0b6b8037d Distinguish more clearly between wait status and exit status
On Unix platforms, wait() and friends yield an integer that encodes
how the process exited. Confusingly, this is usually not the same as
the integer passed to exit() or returned from main(): conceptually it's
an integer encoding of this tagged union:

    enum { EXITED, SIGNALLED, ... } tag;
    union {
        int exit_status;         /* if EXITED */
        struct {
            int terminating_signal;
            bool core_dumped;
        } terminating_signal;    /* if SIGNALLED */
        ...
    } detail;

Meanwhile, on Windows, wait statuses and exit statuses are
interchangeable.

I find that it's clearer what is going on if we are consistent about
referring to the result of wait() as a "wait status", and the value
passed to exit() as an "exit status".

GSubprocess already gets this right: g_subprocess_get_status() returns
the wait status, while g_subprocess_get_exit_status() genuinely returns
the exit status. However, the GSpawn family of APIs has tended to
conflate the two.

Confusingly, g_spawn_check_exit_status() has always checked a wait
status, and it would not be correct to pass an exit status to it; so
let's deprecate it in favour of g_spawn_check_wait_status(), which
does the same thing that g_spawn_check_exit_status() always did.
Code that needs backwards-compatibility with older GLib can use:

    #if !GLIB_CHECK_VERSION(2, 69, 0)
    #define g_spawn_check_wait_status(x) (g_spawn_check_exit_status (x))
    #endif

Signed-off-by: Simon McVittie <smcv@collabora.com>
2021-06-15 14:33:14 +01:00
..
reference Distinguish more clearly between wait status and exit status 2021-06-15 14:33:14 +01:00
CODEOWNERS CODEOWNERS: Add myself as co-owner of Windows stuff 2019-08-27 12:57:32 +05:30
debugging.txt tree: Fix various typos and outdated terminology 2020-06-12 15:01:08 +01:00
macros.txt build: Add glib_debug option 2021-01-20 16:05:36 +01:00