Re: [RFC] improve 'bad default revision' message for empty repo

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 09:51:02PM +0000, Reece Dunn wrote:
>
>> >  > Consider the following workflow:
>> >  >
>> >  >     $ mkdir foo
>> >  >     $ cd foo
>> >  >     $ git --bare init
>> >  >
>> >  >     $ git log
>> >  >     fatal: bad default revision 'HEAD'
>> >  >
>> >  > This message is confusing for a newbie. Displaying "no commits" would
>> >  > make more sense here.
>
> What do people think of this patch? It feels a little hack-ish to make
> guesses as to the reasons for a failure, but in my experience an empty
> repo is the cause of this message in 99% of cases.

>
> We could special-case it to HEAD and make a better message, perhaps, but
> that feels even more hack-ish.

How about doing it this way instead, then?

Saying "fatal: You haven't made a commit?" is like saying "How stupid do
you have to be to realize that you are not allowed to run git-log before
making a commit, dummy?", but that is not the message we need to be
sending.  Asking for log is fine.  If you are on an unborn branch and say
"git log", you deserve to get nothing.  Not even an error message.

Not that I haven't thought through the ramifications of this yet; some
callers may need to be adjusted, but they should be prepared for a case
where no rev was given from the command line anyway.

---

 revision.c |    8 ++++----
 1 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/revision.c b/revision.c
index 63bf2c5..cdd5ad2 100644
--- a/revision.c
+++ b/revision.c
@@ -1323,10 +1323,10 @@ int setup_revisions(int argc, const char **argv, struct rev_info *revs, const ch
 		unsigned char sha1[20];
 		struct object *object;
 		unsigned mode;
-		if (get_sha1_with_mode(def, sha1, &mode))
-			die("bad default revision '%s'", def);
-		object = get_reference(revs, def, sha1, 0);
-		add_pending_object_with_mode(revs, object, def, mode);
+		if (!get_sha1_with_mode(def, sha1, &mode)) {
+			object = get_reference(revs, def, sha1, 0);
+			add_pending_object_with_mode(revs, object, def, mode);
+		}
 	}
 
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