rebase message confusion

[Matt Mackall]

On Wed, 2009-10-07 at 16:17 -0400, Greg Ward wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 3:37 PM, Sune Foldager <cryo at cyanite.org> wrote:
> > Before I can do that, however, I had to make sense of what I consider at
> > best highly confusing status, debug and error messages from hg rebase.
> > For instace, what does this mean?
> >
> > "cannot rebase an ancestor"
> >
> > well it makes you think at least. I am trying to rebase x to an ancestor
> > of x? or to a descendant of x? the latter is correct. But why not the
> > much clearer "source is ancestor of destination"?
> 
> I completely agree with you: rebase's error messages are very
> confusing.  +1 on improving them and to heck with compatibility.   ;-)

Error messages continue to be fair game for improvement:

"Changes to error messages and ui.debug messages are usually fine as
most of these messages are not intended for parsing. One important
exception is hg log, which uses debug messages to show more detail.
Adding messages at the verbose level is also usually acceptable."

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/CompatibilityRules

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