Re: [PATCH] sequencer.c: abbreviate hashs placed in the middle of messages

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@grenoble-inp.fr>
Date: May 10, 2015, 19:36 UTC
Message-ID: <vpqegmow7go.fsf@anie.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqzj5cfdit.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 22 quoted lines

> Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:
>
>> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:
>>
>>> I am not sure how that changes anything.
>>>
>>>     $ git cherry-pick 38e70713119c25ab5699df6b2fb13e4133d399ab
>>>     error: that commit is a merge and you didn't give me -m <which-parent>
>>>
>>>     $ git cherry-pick 38e70713119c25ab5699df6b2fb13e4133d399ab
>>>     error: the commit 38e707... is a merge and you didn't give me -m <which-parent>
>>
>> But ...
>>
>>     ./myscript.sh
>>     error: that commit is a merge and you didn't give me -m <which-parent>
>
> If myscript.sh did not take the user input, what would the first
> thing you (who tried to run the script) would do?  At that point,
> figuring out which wrong commit was fed to underlying cherry-pick
> becomes a lot less important issue than figuring out _why_ the buggy
> script fed a wrong commit to it, doesn't it?

True, but knowing which commit was fed to cherry-pick may explain why it did so. Sure, a developer could find out, but a user asking a question or reporting an issue is more effective when the error message contains as much information as possible.

(Admittedly, in this senario, I should have written ./someone-else-s-script.sh ;-) )

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/