From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 18:32:09 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] commit: reword --author error message
Message-ID: <C67968DA2DD34039AF6EC8B61AA1CA47@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqwq4m3a8k.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>
> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
>
>> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 09:48:26AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>>
>>> > Rename the error message to make it clearer that the failure has 
>>> > two
>>> > reasons in this case:
>>> > "Bad --author parameter '%s': neither completely wellformed nor 
>>> > part of
>>> > an existing one"
>>>
>>> You are trying to help a user who thought "Who www.where.com" was a
>>> valid thing to pass to --author; "it is not completely wellformed"
>>> is not very helpful without making her realize what in that bogus
>>> string is not "completely well-formed".
>>>
>>> Perhaps
>>>
>>>   "--author '%s' is not 'Name <email>' and no existing author 
>>> matches that string"
>>>
>>> or somesuch?
>>
>> Yeah, I think that is OK. It is kind of clunky to read, but it 
>> contains
>> all of the necessary information to lead the user in the right
>> direction.
>
> Indeed it is clunky and not in the usual format.
>
> This might be better, perhaps?
>
>    die(_("--author '%s': not 'Name <email>' and matches no existing 
> author"));
/Bikeshed
     die(_("--author '%s': not 'Name <email>', nor matches any existing 
author"));
The 'not/and' construct didn't feel right here in the UK, but then many 
don't understand 'nor' either.
--
Philip