6.1.2 Error handling

In GnuTLS most functions return an integer type as a result. In almost all cases a zero or a positive number means success, and a negative number indicates failure, or a situation that some action has to be taken. Thus negative error codes may be fatal or not.

Fatal errors terminate the connection immediately and further sends and receives will be disallowed. Such an example is GNUTLS_E_DECRYPTION_FAILED. Non-fatal errors may warn about something, i.e., a warning alert was received, or indicate the some action has to be taken. This is the case with the error code GNUTLS_E_REHANDSHAKE returned by gnutls_record_recv. This error code indicates that the server requests a re-handshake. The client may ignore this request, or may reply with an alert. You can test if an error code is a fatal one by using the gnutls_error_is_fatal. All errors can be converted to a descriptive string using gnutls_strerror.

If any non fatal errors, that require an action, are to be returned by a function, these error codes will be documented in the function’s reference. For example the error codes GNUTLS_E_WARNING_ALERT_RECEIVED and GNUTLS_E_FATAL_ALERT_RECEIVED that may returned when receiving data, should be handled by notifying the user of the alert (as explained in Handling alerts). See Error Codes and Descriptions, for a description of the available error codes.

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