Guidlines for error messages
- From
Kaartic Sivaraam <kaarticsivaraam91196@gmail.com>
- Date
- Jul 29, 2017, 02:57 UTC
- Message-ID
- <1501297078.2711.2.camel@gmail.com>
Hello all,
On reading the CodingGuidelines, I saw a section that specifies rules about the structure and formatting of error messages. I have reproduced it below,
Error Messages
- Do not end error messages with a full stop.
- Do not capitalize ("unable to open %s", not "Unable to open %s") - Say what the error is first ("cannot open %s", not "%s: cannot open")Having used git all these days, I have seen error messages that do seem to be violating the above guidelines (at least the first 2 points). A few are,
Aborting commit due to empty commit message.
fatal: There is no merge to abort (MERGE_HEAD missing).
fatal: You have not concluded your merge (MERGE_HEAD exists).
Please, commit your changes before you merge. error: Empty commit message.
Not committing merge; use 'git commit' to complete the merge.error: pathspec 'hell' did not match any file(s) known to git.
fatal: Not a valid object name foo
fatal: ambiguous argument 'foo..bar': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'A few that do seem to be following the guideline are
fatal: could not read log file 'imaginary_file': No such file or directory
fatal: no input file given for in-place editing
That makes me wonder, has the guideline changed ?
Is this something that must be fixed ?
Am I missing something ? --
Kaartic