From: Phillip Wood Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:38:05 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH v8 2/4] format-patch: add ability to use alt cover format Message-ID: <1759c2fe-6e7a-41b6-9869-97544870ebef@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: On 12/03/2026 17:25, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Mirko Faina writes: > >>> future developers to introduce something other than "shortlog", no? >>> If the version of Git in 'next' supports "longlog" and user gives >> >> Not really, anyone can introduce new formats, it's just an additional if >> statement. >> >>> "--cover-letter-format=longlog" to their version that does not yet >>> support it, it would be mistaken by the version of the code here as >>> a "log:longlog" without any placeholder that shows a fixed string >>> "longlog" for each commit in the series? We'd rather want such an >>> input to cause failure, no? >> >> Isn't that the same for any feature that is in next but not merged in >> master yet? I wouldn't expect subcommands of history not yet merged in >> master to work either if I'm using a version built from master. This is >> an issue with the user and I don't think it's grounds for any issue. > > Or misspelt "chrnological". What are we gaining by removing it, > which would rob safe extensibility (aka "future-proofing") and typo > detection? > > It is a bad idea to drop "log:", period. It's a pain to have to prefix the format string with "log:" when we don't require it anywhere else. If we want to error out on unknown fixed strings then we could reject format strings that do not contain a '%' and do not match any of the other fixed format names such as "shortlog". It means you cannot specify a fixed string for the format but that would seem to be a rather strange thing to do in the first place. Thanks Phillip