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

From: Matthieu Moy <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 May 2015 21:36:23 +0200

Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> writes:

> Matthieu Moy <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> 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/