Re: User-friendly message

On Fri, 20 Jun 2003, [UTF-8] Branko ^Libej wrote:

> Michael Schmitt wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > me@here:~/Platform> svn commit overview.php
> > Sending overview.php
> > svn: Transaction is out of date
> > svn: Commit failed (details follow):
> > svn: out of date: `/Platform/overview.php' in txn `170'
> > svn: Your commit message was left in a temporary file:
> > svn: '/home/me/Platform/svn-commit.2.tmp'
>
> Huh? What redundancy, and how misleading? BTW, _your_ proposal is
> anything but short and concise.

I do not claim that my proposal is perfect! But the original one is

 - too long (6 lines for one error is quite unusual on Linux)
 - misleading (Is the _transaction_ out of date? Isn't it the file?
   What is the real reason of the failure?),
 - incomplete (What shall the user do?),
 - and redundant ("details follow"... just on the next line).

> I'm sooo tired of people complaining about "confusing" error messages
> that are described in the documentation. RTFM already.

Good software doesn't require reading manuals :-)

Have a nice weekend,

Michael

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Sat Jun 21 01:07:40 2003