Re: [PATCH] pretty: add format specifiers for short and raw date formats

From: SZEDER Gábor <szeder@ira.uka.de>
Date: Oct 8, 2015, 11:04 UTC
Message-ID: <20151008130426.Horde.ovF3CHaJ-fo48aLDf23t-Q1@webmail.informatik.kit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqmvvutone.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

Quoting Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>:

Show 10 quoted lines

> SZEDER Gábor <szeder@ira.uka.de> writes:
>
>> @@ -120,6 +120,8 @@ The placeholders are:
>>  - '%at': author date, UNIX timestamp
>>  - '%ai': author date, ISO 8601-like format
>>  - '%aI': author date, strict ISO 8601 format
>> +- '%as': author date, short format
>> +- '%aR': author date, raw format
>
> Hmmm, are these two a good things the only ones that are missing?

Sort of. There is 'local', but after add00ba2de (date: make "local" orthogonal to date format, 2015-09-03) hit master that's not a format anymore.

Show 7 quoted lines

> It makes me wonder if it's time for us to move to a more extensible
> format, e.g. "%aT(...)", in which 'T' stands for 'timestamp' and the
> part in the parentheses can be any format string that is understood
> by "log --date=<format>" [*1*].  Once we have something like that,
> we can keep the existing ones for historical convenience, stop
> adding new ones [*2*] and do not have to worry about these two
> mechanisms going out of sync.

> *1* Yes, and in longer term, we should really aim to unify the
>     for-each-ref format and "--pretty=format:" format.  "%aT(...)"
>     is probably a step in a wrong direction, and it should probably
>     be more like "%(authordate:...)".

That would be great, especially that in [*1*]. Real words are so much better than one or two letter codes. Of course that would also be a lot more invasive change.

> *2* Because we have "%ad", we _can_ stop adding new ones already.

With this patch in my tree I have this pretty alias

   pretty.commitref=tformat:%h (%s, %as)

in my config, and a simple '--pretty=commitref' option works on its own to produce the format that I used above. With '%ad' that wouldn't work, because I would need the additional '--date=short' option, too, which means I have to remember it and have to type more every time.

Gábor