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From: Francois Marier <francois@debian.org>
To: git@vger.kernel.org
Cc: sam.vilain@catalyst.net.nz
Subject: Suggestion: better error reporting when setting HEAD
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:58:25 +1300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20081218055825.GQ6708@isafjordur.dyndns.org> (raw)

(Please CC me on your replies, thanks)

If you take any valid git repo and then do the following:

  git symbolic-ref HEAD master
  (instead of "git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/master")

then other git commands (e.g. "git log") will return this error message:

  fatal: Not a git repository

I'd like to suggest two "usability" improvements:

1- changing the error message to explain why the directory is no longer
   considered a git repo. Maybe something along the lines of:

     fatal: Invalid reference in .git/HEAD

2- To prevent this error from happening in the first place, git-symbolic-ref
   could refuse to change HEAD to a non-existent ref.

Cheers,
Francois

             reply	other threads:[~2008-12-18  6:20 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2008-12-18  5:58 Francois Marier [this message]
2008-12-18  8:25 ` Suggestion: better error reporting when setting HEAD Jeff King

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