Re: [PATCH] Fixing unclear messages

From: Alexander Shopov <ash@kambanaria.org>
Date: Aug 11, 2014, 20:04 UTC
Message-ID: <CAP6f5MnqjG-M=Po0ZLcw+DiXKQxzyC4gGeVpWHtjqJyOmNe-zw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqha1i7uqn.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

> If there were something else "Huh?" could mean after you
> give a response to that prompt, but I do not think there is.

OK, you love your "Huh"s. Good for you. I cannot find a convincing argument then.

> If I were asked to say what it is then, I would say "it reassures".

It is like a jewel you find in a quest? On the other hand you say the message is rare enough and shown too late to be useful so there is little gain to change it. OK, fair enough.

> Yes, I see the primary value of this thread was to trigger that
> suggestion to classify which die()s are BUG()s.

Wonderful.

> Because I've never imagined anybody would sensibly expect "mv a1...
>... your rewrite here is definitely a good one in that sense.

My experience shows that messages need to be as helpful as possible even at the cost of some repetition.

> FWIW, I see it as a feature to have small number of messages phrased
> in colourful ways, especially the ones that do not require reaction

I really do not know what to say. People can be color-blind even for messages plus in-jokes frequently do not travel well across languages. Sharing my experience: the messages were hard to translate because they were hard to understand. I had to follow the code in order to understand their meaning and usage. Hopefully other users of git will be more clever than me. I did my best at improving the messages but as you do not perceive it the same way there would be no sense in continuing the discussion much longer.

Will you reconsider:
- ???
+ unknown state
Recoding problems with translations, settings of console sometimes
lead to missing or wrongly encoded characters to show as '?'. Three
'?' can be confusing when shown in translation.

> We obviously do not want to overdo it, but the ones we have are all old ones.

You overdid it for me. On the positive side I hope I have listed all oldies but goldies and next changes will be less touchy.

Do you want me redoing this patch or not at all?

Kind regards: al_shopov