Dear Tom,
In message 20210811124318.GT858@bill-the-cat you wrote:
This argument fits on all types or effors: they are supposed to never ever happen - at least in theory; in reality they do, and more often than we like.
And a proper error message is mandatory for correct error handling.
Error messages are a fine line to walk. We've got to have been very badly corrupted to go down this error path. There's going to be lots of other error messages popping out. Saving a bit of .text is good. It makes it easier to justify spending a little .text later.
Letting errors slip through unnoticed when there is a trival way to at least inform the user of the problem is simply unacceptable.
Please do not let U-Boot degrade into such a crappy piece of code.
There are tons of other places where we don't even mention code size, so if you want to save on that, there are many bette4r places to save than error handling.
And here I agree, catch an error code, pass the error code back to the caller. That's far more important than making sure that every error code we catch logs a message by default every time.
It does not matter where the error is reported - in the called function, or in some caller firther up the call tree. But it _must_ be reportet at least once.
So if we don't issue an error message here, we need to check and fix the callers, too.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk