Re: [PATCH 2/2] pretty: add '%aA' to show domain-part of email addresses

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 28, 2023, 02:13 UTC
Message-ID: <20231028021301.GA35796@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq7cn7obah.fsf@gitster.g>

On Sat, Oct 28, 2023 at 09:12:06AM +0900, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> Grouping @gmail.com addresses do not smell all that useful, though.
> 
> More importantly, it is not clear what "Many reports" refers to.  If
> they are *not* verbatim output from "git log" family of commands,
> iow, they are produced by post-processing output from "git log"
> family of commands, then I do not quite see why %aa is useful at
> all.

One way you could directly use this is in shortlog, which these days lets you group by specific formats. So:

  git shortlog -ns --group=format:%aA

is potentially useful.

I say "potentially" because it really depends on your project and its contributors. In git.git the results are mostly either too broad ("gmail.com" covers many unrelated people) or too narrow (I'll assume I'm the only contributor from "peff.net"). There are a few possibly useful ones ("microsoft.com", "gitlab.com", though even those are misleading because email domains don't always correspond to affiliations).

So I don't find it useful myself, but I see how it could be in the right circumstances. It also feels like a symmetric match to "%al", which already exists. I do find "aa" as the identifier a little hard to remember. I guess it's "a" for "address", though I'd have called the whole local@domain thing an address thing that. Of course "d" for domain would make sense, but that is already taken. If we could spell it as %(authoremail:domain) that would remove the question. But given the existence of "%al", I'm not too sad to see another letter allocated to this purpose in the meantime.

Just my two cents as a shortlog --format afficionado. ;) (Of course, shortlog itself is the ultimate "you could really just post-process log output" example).

-Peff