Re: Improving merge failure message

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 8, 2009, 06:47 UTC
Message-ID: <7vbplmhr0i.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090908153101.6117@nanako3.lavabit.com>

Nanako Shiraishi <nanako3@lavabit.com> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> [2]% git merge feature
> error: Entry 'cool' not uptodate. Cannot merge.
> fatal: merging of trees 8ec1d96451ff05451720e4e8968812c46b35e5e4 and aad8d5cef3915ab78b3227abaaac99b62db9eb54 failed
>
> ... the messages look unnecessarily scary, with two
> "error" and "fatal" comments, and long sha1 commit names.

Just a technical nit.  I think these are tree object names.

Show 8 quoted lines

> Those of us who used git for some time can tell what it wants to say.
> The merge checked the files in the working tree before doing anything,
> found that the user has uncommitted change to a file that is involved in
> the merge, and it stopped. And it didn't change anything. It may be "fatal"
> but the user has much less reason to be scared about this failure than
> the conflicting case.
>
> It would be nice if the message in the latter case can be toned down.

Yeah, it would be nice. This actually was something that bothered me as well while trying to explain the recovery procedure for these two cases. Give me half an hour or so to cook up something...