Peter Cordes wrote:
On Tue, Jan 06, 2015 at 09:48:48PM +0100, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
On Tue, Jan 6, 2015, at 11:34, Antonio Ceballos wrote:
2. My first suggestion is "too neutral" for that context. Your
suggestion probably sounds better. I presume that something
more explicit but longer is worse, such as:
"partition #7 cannot be removed, as it doesn't exist"
Yeah, that is rather oververbose. The message is not a contextless
error message, but gets produced only when --verbose is used. The
previously mentioned example of deleting partitions 5 to 9 (with 7
not existing), the command would be:
partx --delete --verbose -n 5:9 /dev/sda
and it currently would print the following progress messages:
dev/sda: partition #5 removed
dev/sda: partition #6 removed
dev/sda: partition #7 already doesn't exist
dev/sda: partition #8 removed
dev/sda: partition #9 removed
In fact I think the message for #7 is quite good,
and I don't think that my proposal is any better:
dev/sda: partition #5 removed
dev/sda: partition #6 removed
dev/sda: skipping nonexistent partition #7
dev/sda: partition #8 removed
dev/sda: partition #9 removed
As an unbiased observer (never used partx, so I'm the target audience
for understanding its output), either of these two look fine.
"already doesn't exist" mentally parses quickly. That phrasing has
the advantage that the partition number is at the same column as the
messages for successful deletion, so you can scan down the column of
numbers and see that's the only message about #7.
With the 2nd phrasing, I found I took a sec of extra time for my eye
to bounce from the column of #5, #6, <gap>, #8, #9 out to the #7.
So I'd suggest keeping the "partition #%d already doesn't exist". As
a native English speaker, I agree it sounds slightly clumsy, but it
gets the point across quickly and unambiguously. You could maybe lose
the word "already", and say
"partition #%d doesn't exist"
Or maybe "partition #%d: no such partition", to use the familiar
wording of strerror(ENOENT): "no such file or directory".
Since we are discussing wording, I will suggest:
dev/sda: partition #7 currently does not exist
I would think that contractions are not really appropriate in this
environment and may marginally help with scripting by omitting the
apostrophe.
"partition #%d does not exist"
is also reasonable.
-- Bruce
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