Re: git-archive doesn't support --date= option for %ad & %cd format:<string>'s

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 9, 2014, 19:24 UTC
Message-ID: <20141009192428.GB415@peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAMsgyKaHoZtAidWKD_YTggt_Xo0J7krFKHr2eFeg3XJ6H0bBXQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Oct 09, 2014 at 11:19:36AM -0500, Derek Moore wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> PRETTY FORMATS' format:<string> documentation says, "%ad: author date
> (format respects --date= option)", and similarly for %cd.
> 
> But git-archive does not support the --date= option for changing the
> date format in $Format:%ad$ or $Format:%cd$ substitution strings.

Correct. You can use %ai, %aD, etc to pick a format. But...

> Relatedly, I want a short RFC date, not a short ISO date, but there is
> only --date=short, which is ISO.

If you start adding new formats, we are likely going to run out of reasonably-memorable letters.

We've discussed something like "%ad(rfc822)" in the past, and I even had a patch:

  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/168512

but it got bogged down in a discussion on potentially expanding the placeholder syntax to something more regular (probably "%(authordate:rfc822"), like for-each-ref does. That's from 2011, and I doubt anybody is working on it now.

> Would introducing --date=shortrfc and --date=shortiso be feasable,
> with --date=short aliasing to --date=shortiso. With a shortrfc, I
> could recreate SVN $Date$'s, which would be equivalent to $Format:%ai
> (%ad)$ when used with "git archive --date=shortrfc".

I don't see a big problem with that. But I wonder if we would do better to introduce arbitrary strftime-like formatting, so we do not have to keep adding new formats.

-Peff