Re: Useless error message?

Jonathan Nieder [off-list ref] writes:

The problem is this: as far as I can tell, the git protocols are
designed around the success case.  Sometimes if there is an error or
other interesting event, the servers are kind enough to notify the
user “on the side”.  But in the end, all too often, they do not bother
to inform the client _program_ that a fatal error occured.

The true story is a bit different.

To avoid information leak to git-daemon clients, we deliberately choose
not to give detailed error messages, so that you cannot tell if an error
means a user "u" does not exist or "u" does but ~u/repo.git repository
does not exist.

So the trick is to make it expected more often.  See the side-band-64k
capability in Documentation/technical/protocol-capabilities.txt: the
goal is to have fatal error messages for as many failure modes as
possible.

For authenticated users (read: services that typically are behind auth) it
would be a good thing, but "as many as possible" you shouldn't be followed
blindly.