Re: [PATCH] errors: "strict subset" -> "ancestor"

On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 08:51:29AM +0100, Steffen Prohaska wrote:

On Nov 3, 2007, at 3:39 AM, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

quoted

From: J. Bruce Fields <redacted>

The term "ancestor" is a bit more intuitive (and more consistent with
the documentation) than the term "strict subset".

Also, remove superfluous "ref", capitalize, and add some carriage
returns, changing:

	error: remote 'refs/heads/master' is not a strict subset of local ref 
'refs/heads/master'. maybe you are not up-to-date and need to pull first?
	error: failed to push to 'ssh://linux-nfs.org/~bfields/exports/git.git'

to:

	error: remote 'refs/heads/master' is not an ancestor of
	 local 'refs/heads/master'.
	 Maybe you are not up-to-date and need to pull first?
	error: failed to push to 'ssh://linux-nfs.org/~bfields/exports/git.git'

Junio suggested in [1] (see also earlier messages in that
thread) to replace the recommendation to pull with a hint
where to look in the user manual.

[1] http://marc.info/?l=git&m=119398999317677&w=2


The point is, there are various ways to resolve the problem.
pull is not necessarily the right solution. At least, you should
consider to rebase. Or maybe just something else went wrong.

Yeah, actually in my case I usually want to force....

So I think it's a good suggestion, but I'm putting it off for now as I'm
not sure yet where to refer people to, and don't like making the error a
lot longer.

Hm.  I wonder if extra "help" commandline flags would be a way to get
people extra guidance on particular situations without cluttering up the
default messages ("not sure what to try next?  Try -h notanancestor..."
Maybe not.)

Nonetheless I think it could be a good idea to keep the most
likely cases. So, how about

"Are you up-to-date? Did you forget to pull or rebase? See User's Manual 
for details."

I put it as questions to avoid making a suggestion. The questions
should give sufficient hints for searching in the User's Manual.
I haven't found the single section that would explain exactly
the situation we're dealing with.

Me neither.  And I don't think a reference to the whole thing is
helpful.

--b.