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 23, 2009, 01:44 UTC
Message-ID: <7v7i3ix6yi.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090222230620.GB19011@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 23 quoted lines

> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 01:23:54PM -0800, eletuchy@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> From: Eugene Letuchy <eugene@facebook.com>
>> 
>> In the context of sizing the git blame time column, it doesn't make a
>> lot of sense to see "12 months ago" next to an exact timestamp +
>> timezone for something 13 months ago. This commit makes commits older
>> than 12 months display the date only, not the time.
>
> I think this is an improvement, though I was thinking of taking it a
> step further:
> ...
> +		/* Otherwise, years. Centuries is probably overkill. */
> +		snprintf(timebuf, sizeof(timebuf), "%lu years ago", (diff + 183) / 365);
> +		return timebuf;
>  	}
>  
>  	if (mode == DATE_LOCAL)
>
>
> but maybe other people actually like seeing the absolute time. I've
> always found it jarring when reading relative times (but part of that
> _was_ because it was so long and exact).

I agree this is an improvement. It irritated me, too. And I do not think this change falls into the category of bad backward incompatibility.

I was hoping somebody would do a "N years M months", though.