Re: [RFC PATCH v3 4/4] builtin/branch: give more useful error messages when renaming

From: Kaartic Sivaraam <kaartic.sivaraam@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 3, 2017, 02:41 UTC
Message-ID: <59d4a08d-7165-9e56-5ddc-4f97d4a9d4d4@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAPig+cRJDiHXoz-81EMtsbFfqaZz76eo1msUQW+eBP=wUsm6JA@mail.gmail.com>

On Thursday 02 November 2017 07:51 PM, Eric Sunshine wrote:

> 
> Nicely explained; easily understood.
>

Good to hear that.

Show 16 quoted lines

> 
> Translators can correct me, but this smells like "sentence lego"[1],
> which we'd like to avoid. Translators lack full context when presented
> with bits and pieces of a sentence like this, thus the translation may
> be of poor quality; it may even be entirely incorrect since they don't
> necessarily know how you will be composing the various pieces.
> 
> You _might_ be able to able to resolve this by dropping "and" from:
> 
>      "foo is moo, and bar is boo"
> 
> to turn the error messages into independent clauses:
> 
>      "foo is moo; bar is boo"
> > but I'm no translator, and even that may fail the lego sniff test.
>

Though I can't be very sure that the one you suggested will pass the "lego sniff test", its better than the "and" I used. Further, my instinct says it wouldn't qualify as sentence lego (it's just a ";").

Show 8 quoted lines

> A sure-fire way to avoid lego construction would be simply to emit
> each messages on its own line:
> 
>      fatal: branch 'tset' doesn't exist
>      fatal: branch 'master' already exists
> 
> (though, you might consider that too ugly).
>

Though it might not look that ugly, I don't know how you could make 'git' die() twice (or am I missing something)! Of course we could use 'error()' to report the errors and then 'die()' with a message like "Branch rename failed" but I find that to be a little too verbose and further using the connector ";" instead of "and" does seem to reduce the possibilities for the above program fragment to pass the "lego sniff test".

--- Kaartic