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, 16:33 UTC
Message-ID: <7v8wnxun8e.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090223031631.GC22348@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> I thought about that, but I wanted to keep the maximum size down for
> column output (like in git-blame). Which is why I bumped the "use
> months" limit to 24 months instead of 12.
>
> And that limit can also be tweaked.  Surely at some point there is a
> range where you no longer care about the months and "N years" has high
> enough resolution. But there is also a point where "N months" gets
> cumbersome (75 months is a more annoying than "around 6 years"). The
> question is whether we reach the "cumbersome" point before we reach the
> "don't care about months" point.

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.

> 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.