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

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Feb 22, 2009, 20:34 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0902221225080.3111@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <94a0d4530902221014i46e52542j2380386405b559e2@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, 22 Feb 2009, Felipe Contreras wrote:

>
> 'git log --pretty=foo' is very unintuitive, no one would ever find
> that option by intuition. Are there different kinds of pretties? Is
> the default behavior --ugly?

Historically, the default behaviour _was_ indeed --ugly.

There was no native "git log" command per se, it was literally a script that did something like

	git-rev-list <rev-opts> |
		git-diff-tree --stdin --pretty |
		$(PAGER)

and the "--pretty" option was to tell git to give human-readable output from git-diff-tree rather than the harsh raw stuff.

So yes, the default for git used to be "low-level plumbing commands for scripting", with some options to turn them pretty for the fleshies.

Then we started having more options, so "--pretty" became "--pretty=xyz".

But I do realize that without the historical background, none of this makes sense. And quite frankly, I do hate "--pretty=xyz" myself. I find myself wishing I could just write

	git log --oneline

instead of "--pretty=oneline", and I wish "shortlog" was a pretty format instead of a command of its own.

So at least personally, I would not object AT ALL to

 - leave the "--pretty=xyz" parsing for historical reasons

 - support "--format=xyz" too, because it does make sense (and it's 
   unambiguous: a format without a '%' sign in it makes no sense, so there 
   is no reason to have "--format=format:%s"

 - if we see an unrecognized "--<option>", and the <option> is a format 
   name, just assume the user was lazy and couldn't be bothered to write 
   out "format="

and then for extra bonus points, make "shortlog" work as a format too.

			Linus