Re: Feature Request: Document the log format string equivalent of built-in formats

From: Henry Qin <root@hq6.me>
Date: Oct 15, 2024, 18:43 UTC
Message-ID: <CAO8bsPDiVLei4uc96jv2BnhQapo2NaFLu-MbdBMmdCKVtFuyZA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <22391e5d-c6fa-4b33-a12a-b63bbb979d81@app.fastmail.com>

Thanks for backlinking! I had intended to link my SO question and then forgot.

That matches what I saw from reading the code as well. As far as I could tell, the `pretty_print_commit` function only calls `repo_format_commit_message` when `pp->fmt == CMIT_FMT_USERFORMAT`, and not at all the built-in formats.

Thus, we cannot infer the correct format string equivalent by simply reading the code, which is another reason why I think it's worth documenting the closest format string equivalent and its limitations. Ideally, the format string is powerful enough to replicate the built-in formats, but if it is not, then that is also worth documenting explicitly.

References: https://github.com/git/git/blob/ef8ce8f3d4344fd3af049c17eeba5cd20d98b69f/pretty.c#L2282 https://github.com/git/git/blob/ef8ce8f3d4344fd3af049c17eeba5cd20d98b69f/pretty.c#L2294

On Tue, Oct 15, 2024 at 11:06 AM Kristoffer Haugsbakk <kristofferhaugsbakk@fastmail.com> wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

>
> Backlink:
>
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79089206/is-it-possible-to-fully-replicate-the-default-behavior-of-git-log-with-a-format
>
> I took a look at the code before today with search terms like
>
>     CMIT_FMT_DEFAULT
>     CMIT_FMT_MEDIUM,
>
> And it looked to me that at least parts of it were implemented using
> regular code branching.  I was thinking that maybe the built-in formats
> were defined just using the formatting primitives.  But it didn’t look
> like that to me.