path/to/some/file: needs update

Would it make sense to change the "needs update" message to read "locally modified"?

I walked out of the office yesterday afternoon little knowing that the two folks left there, who are both VCS neophytes in general, were about to enter what they described as "version control H#@@".

It all started when one of them tried to pull the latest version of our repository from the server. He was quite startled by all of the messages that read

path/to/some/file: needs update.

Then things got worse... one of the messages said:

error: Entry 'path/to/some/binaryfile' not uptodate.  Cannot merge

"Huh?!?!", they exclaimed to each other. "I wasn't doing a merge. I was doing a pull. Well, I guess that's kinda like a merge. But why did it generate an error? Shouldn't it have generated a conflict message?". At least, I'm imagining that's what they said to each other. I wasn't there. I just got the phone call an hour later when I was on the train going home.

Needless to say, I was able to calm them down. But it occurred to me that "needs update" isn't necessarily the most helpful message and that "error: ... Cannot merge" could offer a little more explanation.

I'm happy to submit the trivial patch changing "needs update" to "locally modified". I suspect there might be some ramifications in terms of scripts that expect the old message to be there, but hopefully not.

What do folks think?

--wpd