unfortunately, a large portion of programs which call crypt are not
prepared for its failure and do not check that the return value is
non-null before using it. thus, always "succeeding" but giving an
unmatchable hash is reportedly a better behavior than failing on
error.

it was suggested that we could do this the same way as other
implementations and put the null-to-unmatchable translation in the
wrapper rather than the individual crypt modules like crypt_des, but
when i tried to do it, i found it was making the logic in __crypt_r
for keeping track of which hash type we're working with and whether it
succeeded or failed much more complex, and potentially error-prone.
the way i'm doing it now seems to have essentially zero cost, anyway.