Coding standards and output parameters

[Greg Hudson]

On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 15:25 -0500, Sam Hartman wrote:
> I think the requirement looks fine.  It doesn't cover the case where
> you explicitly want some output to be available on error--for example
> an API token that needs to be sent over the network on error return
> might want to be output even if the function does not return success.

I adjusted the wording slightly to avoid the appearance of prohibiting
such functions.  (I didn't specifically bring them up, though; I don't
want the standards to be too complicated.)

> Such cases should be clearly documented and until we have a good place
> for API docs, that's really hard to do.

Yes, I'm hoping we can agree on a practice for API documentation (and
documentation of internal helper functions, for that matter) in the
not-too-distant future, and add that to the wiki documentation.  That's
a separate conversation, though.