Re: [PATCH] Fixing unclear messages

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 10, 2014, 19:37 UTC
Message-ID: <20140810193659.GB9886@peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <1407683607-4143-2-git-send-email-ash@kambanaria.org>

On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 06:13:27PM +0300, Alexander Shopov wrote:

> Signed-off-by: Alexander Shopov <ash@kambanaria.org>

It would probably make sense to put the discussion from your cover letter into the commit message.

Show 11 quoted lines

> diff --git a/builtin/index-pack.c b/builtin/index-pack.c
> index 5568a5b..d9c5911 100644
> --- a/builtin/index-pack.c
> +++ b/builtin/index-pack.c
> @@ -1064,7 +1064,7 @@ static void parse_pack_objects(unsigned char *sha1)
>  		nr_delays--;
>  	}
>  	if (nr_delays)
> -		die(_("confusion beyond insanity in parse_pack_objects()"));
> +		die(_("fatal error in function \"parse_pack_objects\". This is a bug in Git. Please report it to the developers with an e-mail to git@vger.kernel.org."));
>  }

We usually just say:

  die("BUG: ...");

here (and hopefully the "..." actually describes the situation a bit better). I have wondered if we should actually introduce a

  BUG("...");

function. Then it would make it simple to be more verbose (e.g., pointing the user to the mailing list as you do here) without having to repeat the text in each place.

-Peff