Re: Pretty date option for git tag?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 18, 2009, 21:27 UTC
Message-ID: <20090518212731.GA14050@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <200905182311.41876.trast@student.ethz.ch>

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 11:11:37PM +0200, Thomas Rast wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Jeff King wrote:
> > It seems like you should be able to script around for-each-ref and
> > remain efficient, but I don't think there is a way to convince it to
> > dereference tags.
> 
> Actually there's the * operator.  For example
> 
>   git$ git for-each-ref --format="%(objecttype) %(*objecttype)" refs/tags/v1.6.0
>   tag commit
> 
> Does that solve the problem at hand?

Oh, right, thanks. I missed that when reading the manual (I was looking for "dereference" or "peel", but those words are never used). So you can do:

  git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)
  Tag: %(taggername) %(taggeremail) %(taggerdate)
  Commit: %(*authorname) %(*authoremail) %(*authordate)
  ' refs/tags

to show both.

That could go in an alias, though it isn't exactly what the original poster asked for. Besides not being a one-line format, it has refs/tags/ cruft at the beginning of each ref. I think what the OP asked for exactly is:

  eval "`git for-each-ref --shell --format='
    r=%(refname)
    d=%(taggerdate)
    T=${r#refs/tags/}
    echo "$T $d"
    ' refs/tags`"

Though as Linus said, I think the actual commit date is also interesting (and you could expand that shell snippet to show it instead, in addition to, or whatever).

And before anyone says anything, yes, I think building a shell script and eval'ing it is a little ugly compared to a "--show-date" option to "git tag". If this is something a lot of people want to do, it wouldn't be that hard an option to add (in fact, it would be really nice to unify the show-ref and pretty=format substitutions, and extend them into "git tag --format='%r %td'" or whatever).

-Peff