Re: Teach "approxidate" about weekday syntax

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Nov 18, 2005, 02:38 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0511171828380.13959@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <46a038f90511171740x756b0336ib8b8937ee3a2af03@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005, Martin Langhoff wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> That'd be even harder to define -- I'd rather have it spit out what it
> interpreted so that porcelains can display it to the user. The user
> can tell at a glance if the parser is off -- for it will be off by a
> mile.

Well, quite frankly, almost always it's pretty damn obvious.

We could make it less so: the most common mistake when it doesn't parse sanely is that it doesn't parse anything at all, but it saw a number somewhere, and thought it was a day of the month.

For example, "last janurary" will silently parse to just "1" (miss-spelled "january"), which will be interpreted as the "first of this month".

And we could make _that_ be an error. If you want the first of this month, you'd have to spell out the month, ie write "Nov 1" instead of just "1".

Apart from that parsign error, pretty much everything else will tend to parse correctly or just give "now" (which is pretty obvious when you ask for a log "since now", and get an empty answer back).

But quite frankly, I don't think the approximate date-parsing is serious enough to even worry about these kinds of things. I actually use it, but I don't think anybody _depends_ on it. It's useful to do

	gitk --since=last.week

just as a way to speed up the startup (if you're just interested in the top of the tree, the kernel history is so big that it's just pointless to do a full gitk, and doing the "since last week" is a quick way to just limit the history enough that it makes the graph cleaner).

And if you get that wrong, who cares? It's not a big deal. The approxidate parsing is one of those "hey, that's nice" features, but it's definitely not important.

		Linus