Re: [Monotone-devel] non-content conflict messages

[Derek Scherger]

Zack Weinberg wrote:
> On 9/23/07, Derek Scherger <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I've been playing around a bit with the rather cryptic messages that
>> monotone generates on so called non-content conflicts and hopefully have
>> improved things a bit.
> 
> Cool!  Your revisions are definitely better than what we had, but I
> think they could be even better still.

I've finally put the changes I had pending on the
net.venge.monotone.cleanup.conflict-messages branch and started looking
at this again.

> diagnostic messages.  What would be good to have, though, is ancestral
> names, whenever that makes sense.

We really do need names from some common ancestor to be able to properly
report things like file X has been renamed to two conflicting names X1
and X2. It doesn't appear that we have a common ancestor handy in most
cases though and I'm having visions of having to do something like
automate common_ancestors to get one. Any suggestions?

> As a tangential nit, these are _not_ warnings, we're just using W()
> for them because we don't have a better way to do it.  Can we have D()
> [stands for "detailed error"] whose semantics are: it prints a
> diagnostic which is a hard error, but then it returns to its caller
> rather than terminating the process; furthermore, the "error: " leader
> appears only the first time D() is called, and _not_ subsequently when
> E() is called; and finally, it sets a flag in the ui object which
> causes an invariant failure if D() has been used and then the program
> attempts to exit successfully.  [Or some more elegant way of ensuring
> that code that uses D() always follows it up with an E().]

In addition to this it would be nice to have some way to include blank
lines in the output that don't contain the "mtn:" prefix since the error
for a single conflict is going to span multiple lines.

Using 'std::clog << std::endl;' directly works for this but the ui class
should probably provide something akin to the other logging macros so it
can play nicely with the tickers.

Cheers,
Derek