make error()'s constant return value more visible

When git is compiled with "gcc -Wuninitialized -O3", some inlined calls provide an additional opportunity for the compiler to do static analysis on variable initialization. For example, with two functions like this: int get_foo(int *foo) { if (something_that_might_fail() < 0) return error("unable to get foo"); *foo = 0; return 0; } void some_fun(void) { int foo; if (get_foo(&foo) < 0) return -1; printf("foo is %d\n", foo); } If get_foo() is not inlined, then when compiling some_fun, gcc sees only that a pointer to the local variable is passed, and must assume that it is an out parameter that is initialized after get_foo returns. However, when get_foo() is inlined, the compiler may look at all of the code together and see that some code paths in get_foo() do not initialize the variable. As a result, it prints a warning. But what the compiler can't see is that error() always returns -1, and therefore we know that either we return early from some_fun, or foo ends up initialized, and the code is safe. The warning is a false positive. If we can make the compiler aware that error() will always return -1, it can do a better job of analysis. The simplest method would be to inline the error() function. However, this doesn't work, because gcc will not inline a variadc function. We can work around this by defining a macro. This relies on two gcc extensions: 1. Variadic macros (these are present in C99, but we do not rely on that). 2. Gcc treats the "##" paste operator specially between a comma and __VA_ARGS__, which lets our variadic macro work even if no format parameters are passed to error(). Since we are using these extra features, we hide the macro behind an #ifdef. This is OK, though, because our goal was just to help gcc. Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>