Re: git bugreport with invalid CLI argument does not report error

[Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>]

On Wed, Oct 25, 2023 at 6:53 PM Emily Shaffer <nasamuffin@google.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 07:59:16AM +1100, Sheik wrote:
> > Running git bugreport with an invalid CLI argument in a valid Git directory
> > does not report error. Expected behaviour would be that it reports an error.
>
> It looks like parse-options.[ch] helps us here for misspelled dashed
> options, like `--diaggnose`. But it doesn't complain when there are
> unexpected positional arguments. I think we can just notice if there are
> any argc left over, complain, and print usage.
>
> I put together a quick patch; could be that we don't need to leave this
> error about "positional arguments" and can leave it as an exercise to
> the reader to compare their previous command to the usage text. I guess
> we could also unroll remaining argv but it was just a hair more time
> than I wanted to spend ;)
>
> --- 8< ---
> Subject: [PATCH] bugreport: reject positional arguments
>
> git-bugreport already rejected unrecognized flag arguments, like
> `--diaggnose`, but this doesn't help if the user's mistake was to forget
> the `--` in front of the argument. This can result in a user's intended
> argument not being parsed with no indication to the user that something
> went wrong. Since git-bugreport presently doesn't take any positionals
> at all, let's reject all positionals and give the user a usage hint.
>
> Signed-off-by: Emily Shaffer <nasamuffin@google.com>
> ---
> diff --git a/builtin/bugreport.c b/builtin/bugreport.c
> @@ -126,6 +126,11 @@ int cmd_bugreport(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
> +       if (argc) {
> +               error(_("git bugreport does not take positional arguments"));
> +               usage(bugreport_usage[0]);
> +       }

This error message may be somewhat difficult to interpret. Providing
additional context could help the user understand the actual problem.
For instance:

    % git bugreport diagnose
    error: unrecognized argument "diagnose"