Re: approxidate woes

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Nov 15, 2018, 14:48 UTC
Message-ID: <20181115144854.GB16450@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20181115134528.GA21242@inner.h.apk.li>

On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 02:45:28PM +0100, Andreas Krey wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I've now located why our backup repo shrinks every month:
> 
>   git gc --prune=2d
> 
> doesn't do what I expected, and differs a lot from --prune=48h.

Yeah, it understands "2 days", but not "d" as a unit.

I don't think "48h" does what you expect either:

  $ t/helper/test-date approxidate now
  now -> 2018-11-15 14:43:32 +0000

  $ t/helper/test-date approxidate 48h
  48h -> 2018-11-15 14:43:34 +0000

  $ t/helper/test-date approxidate 48.hours
  48.hours -> 2018-11-13 14:43:38 +0000

It might be reasonable to teach approxidate these obvious shorthands (one tricky one is "m"; normally I'd say "minute", but in Git timescales "month" is more likely).

Show 5 quoted lines

> Mildly irritating, and worse, hard to find in the documentation.
> I failed at the latter and fell back to the sources, finding
> './bin-wrappers/test-date approxidate' for trying.
> 
> Where would I look?

I don't think approxidate is really documented at all. It started as Linus's idea of "handle what people would probably say", and the fixes over the years have mostly been "eh, that's crazy, let's do better with this input".

You'd have to reverse engineer it a bit from the source, unfortunately.

-Peff