Re: [PATCH] pretty format string support for reflog times

From: Phil Pennock <phil@pennock-tech.com>
Date: Jul 27, 2016, 14:17 UTC
Message-ID: <1469629060.2278222.678276953.09D0768E@webmail.messagingengine.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160727135820.GC14928@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Wed, Jul 27, 2016, at 09:58, Jeff King wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 04:14:14AM -0400, Phil Pennock wrote:
> > The reflog contains timestamp information, but these were not exposed to
> > `--pretty`.  Four of the six author/committer format string
> > second-letters were still available and copied, but `d`/`D` are taken
> > for reflog selector formatting.  So use `%gT` for "time" instead of
> > "date" mnemonic for using `--date=...` formatting.
> 
> Hrm. Since Ted was not cc'd, it is not clear to me whether this is
> coincidental or in response to the thread over in
> 
>   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/299201

Coincidental, I was unaware of that. Sorry for the duplication. Please ignore my patch, I'm not going to even try to compete with Mr Ts'o.

I asked a friend who is a git developer why this wasn't available, he said it would be fairly easy to do, I asked if he was trying to suck me into contributing patches to git, he said yes. I neglected to search archives for myself.

Besides "two independent submissions in short space of time" as evidence that this functionality is wanted, my real-world motivator was: `go get $something` failed, until I told the Golang tooling to update dependencies too; after that I wanted to easily see when the dependency was last updated on my local system and ended up having to look at the reflog on disk and manually convert timestamps.

> To summarize, I think the conclusion there was that we would go with at
> least the 't' and 'r' formatters in the short term.

'r' and one of the non-relative renderers are the ones I put into a `[pretty]` item for my use.

> to get "HEAD@{0} ...rfc-date...", because the presence of "--date" is
> the trigger to switch the meaning of "%gd".

Yes, I went for completeness even though it led to some duplication, and tested them all. Though it looks like I didn't include the --date modifications into the test-suite example. Oops.

Thanks for the review and the cluebat. -Phil