Re: Patch that modifies git usage message

From: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Date: May 1, 2015, 17:40 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPig+cROY5ZaXtAWpaMpe8JsuG1eSp2jhAsSh1dAsCSACgoFxw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAKB+oNtKi6e7H9U75WEJDKH2KK349JT+vGE8+acHvM6SasCWfQ@mail.gmail.com>

(Etiquette on this list is to reply inline rather than top-posting[1].)

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 12:38 PM, Alangi Derick <alangiderick@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> What about the other strings used for
> error display? For example
> die("cannot handle %s as a builtin", cmd);
> Can't i change the "cannot" to "Cannot"? Or is there a problem with
> that one too?

Despite inconsistencies in existing code, lowercase in new error messages is intentional. Documentation/CodingGuidelines has this to say[2]:

    Error Messages

    - Do not capitalize ("unable to open %s", not "Unable to
      open %s")

Therefore, a goal more aligned with this recommendation would be to submit a patch which changes capitalized error messages to lowercase, however, heed this warning[3] from CodingGuidelines:

   - Fixing style violations while working on a real change as a
     preparatory clean-up step is good, but otherwise avoid useless
     code churn for the sake of conforming to the style.

     "Once it _is_ in the tree, it's not really worth the patch noise
     to go and fix it up."
     Cf. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/943020

Sometimes there are exceptions. One may be able to argue that making user-facing messages more consistent is worthwhile (for instance [4]).

Finally, changing "usage:" to "Usage:" would undo recent work to improve consistency of usage messages[4].

[1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2005/1/11/111 [2]: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/CodingGuidelines#L416 [3]: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/CodingGuidelines#L21 [4]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/216961