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

On Nov 4, 2007, at 11:08 PM, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

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

quoted

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.

I agree. And it's probably a waste of time anyway, because
sooner or later the mega-terse fetch output will be extended
to push.

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.)

The first step would be to describe the error messages in the
manual (or the man pages), and provide hints how to resolve
them. Currently we have no place we could link to, even if we
had a mechanism to do so.

	Steffen