Hello,
in order to get along a bit further the way to a possible AVRDUDE
library release, I made a big sweep across all library code, replacing
most of the calls to exit() by appropriate error return values.
For obvious reasons, library code should never call exit() unless
there is a really severe error that mandates the entire application
needs to be aborted.
I left the following instances:
. Calls to exit() after a failed malloc (and relatives); if there is
no more memory in today's VM operating systems, normally there won't
be any way to proceed at all. Other portions of the code (like
stdio) are no longer guaranteed to work then either.
If people really think it's worth the while, we could catch these
instances of exit() later, replacing them by something like
malloc_failed(), to be provided by the application framework (i.e.
by main.c in the traditional CLI tool).
. Calls to exit() in situations (in dfu.c and flip*.c) which are
thrown in situations where some backend function reported more data
being read than expected; in that case, some internal buffer would
have been overflown already, so it seems best to escape from the
application the shortest way possible.
In some cases, I had to propagate up some error code from the function
that previously called exit(), so the caller could handle the
situation. That wasn't always possible without refactoring the code,
so there are now situations where AVRDUDE might try to continue even
though a previous error was detected.
The worst offender here is the buspirate code, which was scattered
with calls to exit() all over the place. I tried my best, but I don't
know enough of the buspirate stuff to properly handle that myself.
Anyone who owns that hardware should make some thorough testing again,
and suggest improvements where possible.