Re: fatal: ambiguous message

From: Bruce Korb <bruce.korb@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 2, 2011, 18:03 UTC
Message-ID: <4D20BE0B.6040104@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4D1DFF96.4010004@redhat.com>

On 12/31/10 08:06, Eric Blake wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> On 12/30/2010 06:37 PM, Bruce Korb wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Is this fatal?  If so, how come it continued?
> 
> It's fatal to git-version-gen, which did not continue.

git-version-gen has but two fatal conditions: invalid arguments yielding a usage message and an unreadable "tarball version file". That is not this message, but might be clarified with:

    v=`cat $tarball_version_file 2>&1` || {
        echo "$0 error: unreadable tarball version file $1:  $v" >&2
        exit 1
    }

In any event, the invocation is:
   ./git-version-gen .tarball-version
and the file ".tarball-version" does not exist, hence git-version-gen
should not fail at all.  So, this message says, "fatal: ..."
and comes from git and all three "git" invocations redirect stderr to
/dev/null.  The fact that we see it is a git bug.  Error messages
should be directed to stderr and thus written to /dev/null.

So, git-version-gen is correct to continue, but git should fail with a message that names the program that fails ("git") and should direct the message to stderr.

Note to GIT list: the message in question:

    fatal: ambiguous argument 'v0.1..HEAD': unknown revision \
       or path not in the working tree.

Thanks!  Regards, Bruce