Re: Confusing git pull error message

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 13, 2009, 22:39 UTC
Message-ID: <20090913223923.GA8840@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7v7hw2pmtk.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 02:16:39PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> I am _not_ going to commit the following patch, because it will interfere
> with this clarification effort, but I think we want to do something along
> this line after the "clarification" settles.

Please, yes. When I first suggested the advice.* mechanism, I had a feeling in the back of my mind that there were several such messages which had bothered me, but I didn't read through the code base looking for them. But now that you mention it, this "no merge candidate" message is definitely one of them (not even because it's wrong or anything, but because of sheer _size_ of it).

Show 16 quoted lines

> An observation I'd like to make is that this is way too ugly:
> 
> 	[advice]
>         	pullNoMergeFound = false
>                 pushNonFastForward = false
>                 statusHints = false
> 
> than
> 
> 	[IKnowWhatIAmDoingThankYouVeryMuch]
>         	pullNoMergeFound
>                 pushNonFastForward
>                 statusHints
> 
> but this feature is for people who know what they are doing, so I guess
> the current set-up would be fine.

Maybe a nice shorthand would be '!' for negative booleans. I.e.,

  [advice]
  !pullNoMergeFound
  !pushNonFastForward
  !statusHints

-Peff