Re: [PATCH 2/2] --date=relative falls back to "short" format for commits older than a year

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 24, 2009, 06:59 UTC
Message-ID: <7v63j0mib5.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090224054216.GD4615@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 22 quoted lines

> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 08:33:37AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> Yes, "75 months" is unacceptable.  I suspect people's mind would not work
>> well with anything larger than 60 months.  I've actually thought about
>> "don't care about months" point, but 12 months is a long time.  You
>> certainly remember there still was a noticeable maturity difference
>> between classmates who were born in the earliest months of the school year
>> and in the last months before graduating grade school.  Perhaps after 20
>> years.
>
> I'm not sure human and code development necessarily follow the same
> timelines. Git wouldn't even be in kindergarten yet. ;)
>
>> > Another option would to give higher resolution in number of years, like
>> > "3.5 years" or even "3.1 years".
>> 
>> But I do not think people think of years in terms of decimal fraction.
>
> I think decimal fraction is overkill. Halves or quarters are more
> reasonable.
>
> But after sleeping on it, I think "Y years, M months" is not that bad.

That was what I thought. There may be some very convincing reasoning I am not seeing in the proposals to make it ultra-short like "Y yr M mo" or "Y.x years" (i.e. "we _have_ to keep it under N characters"threshold), but I doubt there is a particular place "Y years, M months" would make the output too long to be acceptable.