Re: [RFC/PATCH] revision.c: add --format option for 'git log'

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 22, 2009, 18:06 UTC
Message-ID: <7vy6vyxs6j.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <7v63j2z7bh.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:
> ...
>> Well, my hope was to replace --pretty=short with --format=short, but
>> you said that would break other scripts.
>
> It is not just scripts you break.  You also break people's trained
> fingers.
> ...
> The only reason why new --format=<fmt> could be an useful addition is
> because --pretty=format:<fmt> may be too long to type interactively.

An obvious alternative with lessor impact than your patch would be not to introduce an additional option --format, but just make ":" as a synonym to "tformat:". Then you can say "--pretty=:%h %s". You would need to type one colon more but that might conceptually be less confusing, when somebody is starting to learn git *after* this change, without knowing that we did not have --format in earlier versions, from the documentation and existing pages on various web sites.