We are designing an error-handling framework for a cryptographic library written in C.
The approach we are taking is that relatively few errors are propagated back to the user since on most occasions he cannot do anything about them (notable exception: parameter validation errors. Of course we tell the user if a call succeeded. We'd also create log entries for fault investigation.) In short, just because we have an error condition somewhere inside the library it does not mean that we need a public (user-facing) error code for it.
Also, from past experience we think that a significant portion of error conditions that require error codes pertain to very narrow areas of code, it is often the case that a particular error is only returned from (or set by) one function.
Therefore we would like to define error codes at the lowest possible level. For example, if only one function can return/set a particular error code we would define that code in the .h file where the function prototype is declared.
However, in such case we might get error code conflicts - the same error code value for different errors. Can someone please propose an elegant approach to avoid such conflicts? Or at the very least an automated mechanism to check for such conflicts (which can then be fixed by hand)?
ERROR_SUCCESS
:P