Re: Doesn't disambiguate between 'external command failed' and 'command not found'

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jul 6, 2011, 17:56 UTC
Message-ID: <20110706175615.GA17978@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vpqlnmidy.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Wed, Jul 06, 2011 at 10:24:57AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > I'm not all that happy with the advice, though. It's pretty technical
> > and specific. I'm not sure whether it would be helpful to most users or
> > not.
> 
> Yeah, Michael's rewording makes it fuzzier by saying "exists, unable to
> execute, maybe git-%s is broken?".

Yeah, I like his better.

> I notice that we do not give the path to the file that implements the
> command. Perhaps we should walk the $PATH after we see this failure to
> pinpoint which one is to be inspected (I vaguely recall a weatherbaloon
> patch to a similar effect)?

That would be better still. But I don't know how much effort this is really worth. It is about catching one specific uncommon misconfiguration. If it were part of a more general exec wrapper that gave better output (which I think is the weatherballoon you mean, that you did a month or three ago), I think it might be more worthwhile.

But even then, I seem to remember the discussion fizzling out to "is this really that common a problem?"

So I'm happy with just taking Michael's patch.

-Peff