[RFC PATCH] help: add optional instructions for reporting bugs

From: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Date: Mar 9, 2017, 19:30 UTC
Message-ID: <20170309193050.19988-1-sbeller@google.com>

Git is distributed in various ways by various organizations. The Git community prefers to have bugs reported on the mailing list, whereas other organizations may rather want to have filed a bug in a bug tracker or such. The point of contact is different by organization as well.

When reporting bugs, users will usually look at the output of 'git --version' at one point to write a quality bug report. So that is a good spot to provide additional information to the user about e.g. additional the organizational quirks how to report a bug.

As the output of 'git --version' is parsed by scripts as well, we only want to present this information to users, which is why we only give the output to TTYs.

Signed-off-by: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
---

Not sure if this is a good idea at all, hence RFC.

Thanks, Stefan

 help.c | 8 ++++++++
 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+)

diff --git a/help.c b/help.c
index bc6cd19cf3..d4c1fbe5cb 100644
--- a/help.c
+++ b/help.c
@@ -9,6 +9,12 @@
 #include "version.h"
 #include "refs.h"
 
+#ifdef GIT_BUG_REPORT_HELP
+const char git_bug_reporting_string[] = GIT_BUG_REPORT_HELP;
+#else
+const char git_bug_reporting_string[] = "To report bugs send a plain text email to git@vger.kernel.org";
+#endif
+
 void add_cmdname(struct cmdnames *cmds, const char *name, int len)
 {
 	struct cmdname *ent;
@@ -435,6 +441,8 @@ int cmd_version(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
 			/* NEEDSWORK: also save and output GIT-BUILD_OPTIONS? */
 		}
 	}
+	if (isatty(1))
+		puts(git_bug_reporting_string);
 	return 0;
 }

-- 
2.12.0.190.g6e60aba09d.dirty