From: Junio C Hamano Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 06:59:26 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] --date=relative falls back to "short" format for commits older than a year Message-ID: <7v63j0mib5.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: <20090224054216.GD4615@coredump.intra.peff.net> Jeff King writes: > 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.