Re: Clueless bisect error message

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 02:51:29PM +0200, Krzysztof Halasa wrote:

> > +			die "You can't bisect a seeked tree!"
> Just to make sure: dictionary.reference.com doesn't know the
> "seeked" word (I don't either though that may be normal).
> 
> Should it read "sought"? Not sure what does the message talk about.

Seeked is not a "real" word in the sense of being in any dictionary. The
past participle form of "seek" is indeed "sought" (though one might want
to use the passive perfect participle form "being sought" for this
case).

However, the use of the word "sought" implies to me the classical
definition of the word seek: "to look for something." The definition we
are using here is a more modern, computer-oriented definition: "to move
to a position within an ordered set" (since we are referring to Cogito's
cg-seek command). Just as you might verbify (another non-word!) a
command and say "I catted those files together", the tree has been
"seeked." One could argue it should be "cat'd" and "seek'd" to indicate
their non-word status, but that idiom is common enough among
programmers, especially Unix users, that I suspect it will make sense
either way.

At any rate, the word "seeked" was in the original error message, so I
didn't introduce it. Are other people bothered by it?

-Peff