Re: [PATCH 2/2] allow '%d' pretty format specifier to show decoration

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 08:43:29PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

I know Junio called you negative, but I actually appreciate having you point out related work (even if I don't get around to reading it for 2 weeks!).

It is funny how similar our patches ended up, even though I didn't even realize yours existed. It looks like the comments were not all that different, either.

To summarize what was said then (for the benefit of Michael, who is moving this forward):

  - Junio didn't like the expansion to include a space and enclosing
    parentheses, because then we don't know where to put the space.
    I agree with that. Though note that you will still end up with an
    extra space for a blank decoration.

  - René suggested a comma delimeter, which Michael's patch does.

  - René suggested a foobar2000-inspired expansion construct for dealing
    with the extra parentheses and space when no decoration exists. If
    we are going to expand the expansion language I think I would prefer
    something more like what show-ref uses (as Jakub suggested), but
    with "tags" expanded so that they can contain arbitrary data. So
    something like:

      %(decorate:delim=, :prefix= (:suffix=\))

    or even:

      %(decorate:+ (%(decorate:delim=, ))

    to use the more shell-ish conditional.

    But I think it is not a problem to introduce '%d' _and_ make such
    improvements later.

  - René also suggested that he wanted a placeholder for git-describe
    output. Logically, this would also want %d. Maybe it is worth making
    this %decorate now to avoid confusion later.

-Peff