bug#36831: enhance 'directory not empty' message

[Assaf Gordon]

Hello,

On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 08:03:45PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Assaf Gordon wrote:
> > An explicit error explicitly saying "cannot move", and mention the source 
> > and
> > destination, and also "blames" the target directory seems the most
> > user-friendly and least ambiguous.
> 
> Sure, but that handles only the ENOTEMPTY/EEXIST case. How would you handle
> the EDQUOT, EISDIR, and ENOSPC cases? Will you invent a separate diagnostic
> for each case, or just treat them as in my proposed patch? I assume the
> latter, but either way I'd like to see a patch that handles these properly
> too. Also, please handle ETXTBUSY while you're at it (sorry, I missed that
> one).
> 
> > For the second and third cases,
> > "No space" and "Quota exceeded" seem to me to always relate to the
> > destination, and I don't think users get confused about those
> > (other opinions of course welcomed).
> 
> What's obvious to experts like us is not always obvious to users. If users
> get confused by the current diagnostic for ENOTEMPTY/EEXIST, I don't see why
> they wouldn't also get confused for ETXTBUSY etc.
> 
> > Your patch also added "EISDIR", for which rename(2) says:
> >  "newpath is an existing directory, but oldpath is not a directory."
> > 
> > But I don't think this error can happen with gnu mv.
> 
> It can, as a result of a race condition if some other process is mutating
> the file system while 'mv' is running. Admittedly unlikely, but we might as
> well improve this errno value while we're improving the others.

All good points.

Please see attached updated version.

It does add explicit error string for each error code, but I hope the
implementation is reasonable and easy to maintain and translate.

-assaf

0001-mv-improve-error-messages-when-target-directory-is-a.patch
Description: Text document