Subject: Re: fatal: ambiguous message

From: Bruce Korb <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2011 10:03:55 -0800

On 12/31/10 08:06, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 12/30/2010 06:37 PM, Bruce Korb wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Is this fatal?  If so, how come it continued?
> 
> It's fatal to git-version-gen, which did not continue.

git-version-gen has but two fatal conditions: invalid arguments
yielding a usage message and an unreadable "tarball version file".
That is not this message, but might be clarified with:

    v=`cat $tarball_version_file 2>&1` || {
        echo "$0 error: unreadable tarball version file $1:  $v" >&2
        exit 1
    }

In any event, the invocation is:
   ./git-version-gen .tarball-version
and the file ".tarball-version" does not exist, hence git-version-gen
should not fail at all.  So, this message says, "fatal: ..."
and comes from git and all three "git" invocations redirect stderr to
/dev/null.  The fact that we see it is a git bug.  Error messages
should be directed to stderr and thus written to /dev/null.

So, git-version-gen is correct to continue, but git should fail
with a message that names the program that fails ("git") and
should direct the message to stderr.

Note to GIT list: the message in question:

    fatal: ambiguous argument 'v0.1..HEAD': unknown revision \
       or path not in the working tree.

Thanks!  Regards, Bruce