Unintuitive error message for hg log -f if file not found

Colin McMillen mcmillen at cs.cmu.edu
Mon Dec 11 16:01:50 CST 2006


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After installing 0.9.2, I decided to put -f in hgrc's defaults section
for the annotate, log, and grep commands, since that seems useful.
However, I accidentally ran log on a file that doesn't exist, and got a
confusing error message:

$ hg log -f idontexist
abort: can only follow copies/renames for explicit file names

Without -f, hg log on a non-existent file name just outputs nothing.
Strangely, just running "hg log -f" by itself, with no explicit file
name, doesn't cause this message to be printed.  So I'm unsure what the
intent of this message is.

I propose that either:

1) no abort message should be printed at all if the file doesn't exist, or
2) the error message should be changed to something like "abort: file
'idontexist' not found", and this message should be printed whether or
not -f is specified.

I'm willing to make a patch if we can agree on what the proper solution
should be.

Colin

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