[jcifs] SmbException Supercedes boolean?

[Rob Wygand]

Mike,

I recently encountered this, and I think it's best to return void.  We 
had some functions that returned boolean, but always threw exceptions on 
errors, and what we found was that some people caught the exceptions and 
did nothing with them, only using the return value of the function. 
This, obviously, caused confusion and errors. It's just a much clearer 
contract when void is returned.

rjw

Allen, Michael B (RSCH) wrote:

> Does anyone have an opinion as to whether or not SmbFile methods should
> return boolean now that many throw SmbException? For example, 0.5.1 has:
> 
> public boolean mkdir()
> 
> which looks like it's java.io.File counterpart and returns true if the directory was
> successfully created and false otherwise. For 0.6.0 I was planning on just
> adding the throws to this like:
> 
> public boolean mkdir() throws SmbException
> 
> but returning boolean is rather pointless given that any kind of failure provokes
> an SmbException. I don't know of any other context that might make use of
> boolean. I think this should just be:
> 
> public void mkdir() throws SmbException
> 
> Any opinions? Obviously this is pretty important because it's undoubtledly
> going to break code so I'd rather only do this once.
> 
> Mike
> 
>