Re: wait_reading_process_ouput hangs in certain cases (w/ patches)

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 11/13/2017 08:00 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I see no reason to consider
> our commentary the definitive documentation of what the code does.  It
> is much more probable that either the commentary was never accurate,
> or it was once, but the code was modified without updating the
> comments.

Hmm, well, since I wrote some of that commentary and code, I can state 
that it was my understanding that the caller should not care about the 
exact value of wait_reading_process_output's result (only whether it is 
negative, zero, or positive), and that my understanding of this API has 
survived until the present day. Partly this was because I did not want 
to change the type of the result if we should ever increase the buffer 
size from 4096 to a value that might not fit in 'int'. In other words, 
the documentation is written the way it's written in order to give the 
implementation some freedom that could be useful in the future.