Re: [PATCH 2/2] --date=relative falls back to "short" format for commits older than a year

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 23, 2009, 03:16 UTC
Message-ID: <20090223031631.GC22348@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7v7i3ix6yi.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 05:44:37PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> > +		/* Otherwise, years. Centuries is probably overkill. */
> > +		snprintf(timebuf, sizeof(timebuf), "%lu years ago", (diff + 183) / 365);
> > +		return timebuf;
> 
> I agree this is an improvement.  It irritated me, too.  And I do not think
> this change falls into the category of bad backward incompatibility.
> 
> I was hoping somebody would do a "N years M months", though.

I thought about that, but I wanted to keep the maximum size down for column output (like in git-blame). Which is why I bumped the "use months" limit to 24 months instead of 12.

And that limit can also be tweaked. Surely at some point there is a range where you no longer care about the months and "N years" has high enough resolution. But there is also a point where "N months" gets cumbersome (75 months is a more annoying than "around 6 years"). The question is whether we reach the "cumbersome" point before we reach the "don't care about months" point.

Another option would to give higher resolution in number of years, like "3.5 years" or even "3.1 years".

-Peff