Refcounts can theoretically be of type uint64_t; in order to be able to
represent the full range, qcow2_get_refcount() cannot use a single
variable to represent both all refcount values and also keep some values
reserved for errors.
One solution would be to add an Error pointer parameter to
qcow2_get_refcount(); however, no caller could (currently) pass that
error message, so it would have to be emitted immediately and be
passed to the next caller by returning -EIO or something similar.
Therefore, an Error parameter does not offer any advantages here.
The solution applied by this patch is simpler to use. Because no caller
would be able to pass the error message, they would have to print it and
free it, whereas with this patch the caller only needs to pass the
returned integer (which is often a no-op from the code perspective,
because that integer will be stored in a variable "ret" which will be
returned by the fail path of many callers).
Signed-off-by: Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>
7324c10f96