Subject: [PATCH] checkout: quote invalid treeish in error message

From: "brian m. carlson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2025 20:32:53 +0000

We received a report that invoking "git restore -source my_base_branch"
resulted in the confusing error message "fatal: could not resolve
ource".  This looked like a typo in our error message, but it is
actually because "-source" is missing its second dash and is being
resolved as "-s ource".  However, due to the lack of the quoting
recommended in CodingGuidelines, this is confusing to the reader and
we can do better.

Add the necessary quoting to this message.  With this change, we now get
this less confusing message:

    fatal: could not resolve 'ource'

Reported-by: Zhelyo Zhelev <[email-masked]>
Signed-off-by: brian m. carlson <[email-masked]>
---
 builtin/checkout.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/builtin/checkout.c b/builtin/checkout.c
index 66b69df6e6..261699e2f5 100644
--- a/builtin/checkout.c
+++ b/builtin/checkout.c
@@ -1899,7 +1899,7 @@ static int checkout_main(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix,
 		struct object_id rev;
 
 		if (repo_get_oid_mb(the_repository, opts->from_treeish, &rev))
-			die(_("could not resolve %s"), opts->from_treeish);
+			die(_("could not resolve '%s'"), opts->from_treeish);
 
 		setup_new_branch_info_and_source_tree(&new_branch_info,
 						      opts, &rev,