On Wed, Mar 27, 2024 at 09:13:31AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > An alternative to using "$var cannot ..." in the error messages (if we
> > don't like the all-lowercase variable name) is to just say "comment
> > strings cannot ...". That vaguely covers both cases, and the message
> > printed by the config code itself does mention the actual variable name
> > that triggered the error.
>
> OK, because the error() return from this function will trigger
> another die() in the caller, e.g.
>
> error: core.commentchar must have at least one character
> fatal: bad config variable 'core.commentchar' in file '.git/config' at line 6
>
> so we can afford to make the "error" side vague, except that the
> "fatal" one is also downcased already, so we are not really solving
> anything by making the message vague, I would think. The posted
> patch as-is is prefectly fine.
Oh, right. For some reason I thought the die() message would have the
variable as written by the user, but that obviously is not true. So I
agree it would not even be an improvement (and the normalizing in my new
error() message is something we've been living with all along anyway for
other messages).
> Side note:
> I wonder if we would later want to somehow _merge_ these two
> error messages, i.e. the lower-level will notice and record the
> nature of the problem instead of calling error(), and the caller
> will use the recorded information while composing the "fatal"
> message to die with. I actually do not know if it is a good
> idea to begin with. If we want to do it right, the "record"
> part probably cannot be a simple "stringify into strbuf" that
> will result in lego message that is harder for i18n folks.
Yeah, this is a general problem of accumulating errors. I had always
assumed in cases like this that we could have some language-independent
syntax like:
die("%s:%d: error parsing '%s': %s",
file, line_nr, var, err_from_callback);
It's certainly lego-like, but it avoids the worst lego cases where
we're literally composing sentences. But as somebody who does not do
translations, it's possible I'm just being optimistic. ;)
-Peff
