The plumbing output is sacred as it is an API. We _could_ change it if it
is broken in such a way that it cannot convey necessary information fully,
but we just do not _reword_ for the sake of rewording. If somebody does
not like it, s/he is complaining too late. S/he should have been here in
early May 2005 and make the language used by the API closer to what humans
read. S/he wasn't here. Too bad, and it is too late.
And people who complain should look at a bigger picture. Look at what was
suggested by one of them and think for five seconds:
$ git checkout mytopic
-fatal: Entry 'frotz' not uptodate. Cannot merge.
+fatal: Entry 'frotz' has local changes. Cannot merge.
If you do not see something wrong with this output, your brain has already
been rotten with use of git for too long a time. Nobody asked us to
"merge" but why are we talking about "Cannot merge"?
This patch introduces a mechanism to allow Porcelains to specify messages
that are different from the ones that is given by the underlying plumbing
implementation of read-tree, so that we can reword the message Porcelains give
without disrupting the output from the plumbing.
$ git-checkout pu
error: You have local changes to 'Makefile'; cannot switch branches.
There are other places that ask unpack_trees() to n-way merge, detect
issues and let it issue error message on its own, but I did this as a
demonstration and replaced only one message.
Yes I know about C99 structure initializers. I'd love to use them but we
try to be nice to compilers without it.