Re: Useless error message?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 22, 2010, 06:33 UTC
Message-ID: <7vwrw0573t.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20100421221953.GA25348@progeny.tock>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> The problem is this: as far as I can tell, the git protocols are
> designed around the success case.  Sometimes if there is an error or
> other interesting event, the servers are kind enough to notify the
> user “on the side”.  But in the end, all too often, they do not bother
> to inform the client _program_ that a fatal error occured.

The true story is a bit different.

To avoid information leak to git-daemon clients, we deliberately choose not to give detailed error messages, so that you cannot tell if an error means a user "u" does not exist or "u" does but ~u/repo.git repository does not exist.

> So the trick is to make it expected more often.  See the side-band-64k
> capability in Documentation/technical/protocol-capabilities.txt: the
> goal is to have fatal error messages for as many failure modes as
> possible.

For authenticated users (read: services that typically are behind auth) it would be a good thing, but "as many as possible" you shouldn't be followed blindly.