"Not a branch" should say more about why

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

bzr reports "bzr: ERROR: Not a branch" for when the problem is not that there isn't a branch but that the directory doesn't exist.

    > bzr merge ~/this-does-not-exist
    bzr: ERROR: Not a branch: "/home/erik/this-does-not-exist/".

ignores the fact that "this-does-not-exist" does not in fact exist.

In this case:

    > bzr merge /tmp/
    bzr: ERROR: Not a branch: "/tmp/".

The error message does make sense, because /tmp does exist but isn't a branch.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

We all want sane messages, but let's turn this into a specifically actionable bug: you want to see the underlying reason why it's not a branch, like "directory blah does not exist"?

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

This may not be quite as easy as it seems because we might encounter several errors before deciding we can't open something, and the most recently is not necessarily the most meaningful. But even that would be an improvement.

[Erik de Castro Lopo (erikd)]

Martin Pool wrote:

> We all want sane messages, but let's turn this into a specifically
> actionable bug: you want to see the underlying reason why it's not a
> branch, like "directory blah does not exist"?

If at all possible yes. Peter Miller's libexplain shows just how
good this can be.

Erik
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/