Subject: Re: [PATCH] gc: remove trailing dot from "gc.log" line

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2021 22:36:01 +0200

On Tue, Aug 31 2021, Eric Sunshine wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 2:18 PM Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> Eric Sunshine <[email-masked]> writes:
>> > On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 10:37 AM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
>> > <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> >>                 warning(_("The last gc run reported the following. "
>> >>                                "Please correct the root cause\n"
>> >> -                              "and remove %s.\n"
>> >> +                              "and remove %s\n"
>> >
>> > Even more bikeshedding:
>> >
>> >     Please correct the root cause and remove
>> >     /path/to/repo/.git/gc.log
>> >     to allow automatic cleanup to resume.
>> >
>> > or something.
>>
>> I also found the line break before "and remove" strange, but I think
>> that is because the "Please" is not at the beginning of the
>> paragraph, but is a second sentence.  Perhaps unfolding "and remove"
>> would make the first line overly long?
>
> Yep, you're right, and perhaps my "Even more bikeshedding" didn't
> clearly indicate that I was bikeshedding more about combining the
> "Please correct..." and "Automatic cleanup..." sentences into a single
> sentence, both as a another way to deal with the punctuation issue
> (thus allowing easy double-click) and to make the whole thing read a
> bit better.

I'm aware that it's not in any formal style guide, but for what it's
worth I find that something like say:

    Eric sent me an E-Mail with the Message-Id
    <CAPig+cTaJ=xm=[email-masked]>
    My E-Mail client is displaying it right now.

Reads unambiguously as having an implied full-stop after "com>",
especially as the next word starts on its own line, and is capitalized
in a way that it wouldn't be if it weren't the start of a sentence.

In any case, I do think just removing the dot on the basis of that
rationale is an improvement, both for the stated ease of copy/pasting,
and to remove the ambiguity of whether the "." is part of the filename
(yeah *nix filenames can also have \n, but that's a lot less likely).

I don't think sometihng like your "Even more bikeshedding" suggestion is
better, since we're trying to continue a sentence after a potentially
long filename that might on some platforms or OS's contain spaces etc.

In any case, I was hoping to just send a quick fix-as-a-patch to a tiny
UX suggestion, and was hoping to not get into the much more subjective
discussion of how to better reword "git gc"'s error messages in
general. If that's where this thread is headed I'm afraid I'll need to
tap out of it :)