[Improvement] Confusing Exception message: "Could not find a 'develop' or 'main' branch, neither locally nor remotely."

When I read this error message, I thought my ‘master’ branch was not recognized by GitVersion whereas the problem was completely unrelated.

Detailed Description

I was trying to have GitVersion work on a private GitLab instance of ours (I’m still a beginner concerning GitLab) and was presented with this exception. I wrongly assumed there was a problem with GitVersion not finding my ‘master’ branch… Even tried to declare it in GitVersion.yml but that was for naught. It appears the problem was on the GitLab side due to how we had configured the way it retrieves a git clone (a detached head only listing a unique (non-master) remote branch, no wonder GitVersion didn’t work).

I understand, by reading GitVersion code, that ‘develop’ and ‘main’ are not real branch names, but rather monikers to whatever the development and the main/principal branch are, but the quotation and the fact they can be real branch names as well is, I suppose, the source of my confusion.

I think that the message either:

• should list ‘master’ along ‘main’ as one of the branches that could not be found:

Could not find a ‘develop’ or ‘main’ or ‘master’ branch, neither locally nor remotely.

• or avoid the use of the quotes and try to have the reader understand we are talking about branch roles rather than branch names. Something along this line:

Could not find any development or main branch, neither locally nor remotely.

Context

I think this (obvioulsy simple and dispendable) change may help diagnose issues like the one I had.

Possible Implementation

If one or the other of my propositions is accepted, I’ll gladly modify the relevant string in a PR

[DarwinJS]

Opps I had done it back to my own fork - fixed now!

[DarwinJS]

I am having this exact problem here when using the default config and I agree that the error seems almost intentionally misleading.

I think the error should be more explicit than the original @odalet suggests:

'Gitversion could not determine which branch to treat as the development branch (default = develop) nor release branch (default = main or master), neither locally nor remotely. Consider diagnosing with git status ; git log -n 1"