Re: [PATCH] doc: State coding guideline for error message punctuation

From: "Junio C Hamano" <redacted>

Philip Oakley [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Clarify error message puntuation to reduce review workload [1].

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/251547
(see trailing 'nit' item).

Signed-off-by: Philip Oakley <redacted>
---

Hmmm.  Do we really need to spell everything out?

It was more of a case of 'do we often have to provide this guidance in 
reviews'?
The trailing full stop does appear to come up moderately often, along 
with other punctuation issues. I am on the 'guidance of the wise and 
education of others' side of the camp, rather than they being rules and 
regulations (as was recently misunderstood), so lets educate.

I haven't yet had the time to search deeply, but I'm sure I've also seen 
various bits of guidance on suitability and style of error messages in 
the last year of so that the section can be rounded out on that front as 
well (no doubt similar to some of the commit message guidance).

I would rather hope that we can rely on our contributors to know Git
well enough to ask "git grep" after reading the "follow the style of
existing and surrounding code" rule that governs the overall
guideline.

I don't see error messages as "code" per se, rather as an attempt at a 
consistent user interface[*], and the user errors can come from 
anywhere, so if we have settled on a style, let's say so.

Philip

[*] My distinction here: "code" is a developer interface, "commands and 
error messages" is the UI.

quoted

 Documentation/CodingGuidelines | 7 +++++++
 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines 

b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines
index 4d90c77..b2f3442 100644

--- a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines
+++ b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines

@@ -404,6 +404,13 @@ For Python scripts:
    documentation for version 2.6 does not mention this prefix, it 

has
    been supported since version 2.6.0.

+Error Messages
+
+ - We typically do not end error messages with a full stop. While
+   we've been rather inconsistent in the past, these days we mostly
+   settle on no punctuation.
+
+
 Writing Documentation:

  Most (if not all) of the documentation pages are written in the

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html