failure to start remote bzr has poor error message

[John A Meinel]

I was recently doing some testing of network performance to a host. So I set "BZR_REMOTE_PATH" in that terminal to my custom script. That was last night, and by today, I had forgotten I had done so.

Today, I went to update my bzr.dev branch, and got:

...=> bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr-pqm/bzr/bzr.dev/: Unable to invoke remote bzr bazaar.launchpad.net; Channel closed.

A better error message could have said:
 Unable to invoke remote /<email address hidden>

Which would have made it clear to me immediately what was wrong.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Or maybe

failed to run 'ssh -v blah@foo /usr/blah/bzr --inet'

and you can improve some other situations with ssh.

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

I would worry a little bit that the command line would get a bit 'crufty'. Given that we do stuff like -OX11Forward=no and other such flags. I do like the idea, though.

I'll note that I generally run via paramiko, so ssh isn't a specific concern, but getting the full info of what failed would, indeed, have helped here.