I don't like the goto fail thing being discussed as an example of goto being evil. If they had used the other common pattern - returning -1 on failure - instead of the pattern they used, their code would look like this:

  if (a)
      return -1;
  if (b)
      return -1;
      return -1;
  if (c)
      return -1;
  return 0;

And literally the exact same issue would occur, even though goto wasn't used.