Re: [PATCH] rev-parse: fix mismatch quoting of separator in the message

From: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Date: Sep 22, 2021, 19:42 UTC
Message-ID: <YUuHP41V9m7cIEBL@nand.local>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqzgs45s15.fsf@gitster.g>

On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 12:28:22PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> writes:
>
> > On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 06:17:45PM +0700, Bagas Sanjaya wrote:
> >> There is a quoting mismatch quoting `--` separator in "no usage string
> >> given...." message (`' instead of ``). Fix it.
> >
> > For what it's worth, I think that the `' style is typographic, since the
> > pair look like English "smart quotes" (as opposed to straight quotes). I
> > have no opinion about which is better, but I don't think the pre-image
> > was necessarily a mistake.
>
> I thought that we try to avoid "smart quotes" in our messages.

I think UTF-8 smart quotes are generally frowned upon in source code, but I didn't think we had any hard-and-fast rule about whether to prefer 'this' to `that' (for what it's worth, I prefer the former and it seems to be more common).

> And we do not expect our users to be expecting to read their error
> messages in markdown, so `--` is not a "Fix", either (do we have
> many instances of such uses of backticks in messages already?).

There are many in code comments, but I could only find a handful in error messages or the description of command-line flags.

Thanks, Taylor