Uninformative error message on branching from branch subdirectory

[Johan Walles]

bzr 1.16.1, bzr-svn 0.6.3.

"
$ bzr branch http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/maven/scm/tags/maven-scm-1.2/src
bzr: ERROR: Not a branch: "/maven/scm/tags/maven-scm-1.2/src".
"

What I should have done is (note lack of /src at the end):
"
bzr branch http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/maven/scm/tags/maven-scm-1.2
"

The error message should tell me that. A better error message would have been:
"
bzr: ERROR: Must branch from top of branch, try this path instead: "/maven/scm/tags/maven-scm-1.2"
"

[Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)]

this is a bzr problem, NotBranchError is special because it's used during the probing (which probably needs an overhaul).

If bzr-svn would throw a more specific error here, you might see it in situations where bzr-svn isn't relevant.

[Samuel Bronson (naesten)]

I don't suppose it would help to subclass NotBranchError, or that there is a way to pass it a better error message?

(I'm a bit surprised that bzr-svn doesn't just do the wrong thing, considering the sloppy way SVN handles branches!)

[Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)]

On Tue, 2011-03-29 at 17:31 +0000, Samuel Bronson wrote:
> I don't suppose it would help to subclass NotBranchError, or that there
> is a way to pass it a better error message?
Yeah, that's ideally how this should be fixed - and it's what we do in
some other situations already. However, bzr currently catches NotBranchError and
displays a custom error message, ignoring the message in the exception.

> (I'm a bit surprised that bzr-svn doesn't just do the wrong thing,
> considering the sloppy way SVN handles branches!)
We could do that, but we don't want to encourage people to do the wrong
thing (and then e.g. complain about bzr-svn performance).

Cheers,

Jelmer