Re: [PATCH 0/4] rev-list: introduce NUL-delimited output mode

> On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 04:44:10PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > Justin Tobler <jltobler@gmail.com> writes:
> > 
> > >>  (4) The traditional "rev-list --missing" output loses the leading
> > >>      "?"; it is replaced by "missing" as the <attr> name, i.e. such
> > >>      a record may look like "<oid> NUL missing=yes NUL..." together
> > >>      with other "<token>=<value> NUL" pairs appended as needed at
> > >>      the end.
> > >
> > > I think this is good. Instead of prefixing missing OIDs with '?', we can
> > > just append another token/value pair `missing=yes`.
> > 
> > And we may want to avoid excessive bloat of the output that is not
> > primarily meant for human consumption, in which case perhaps a
> > common things like "missing" and "path" can be given a shorter
> > token, perhaps like "m=yes" and "p=Makefile"?
> 
> I would prefer to keep longer paths here:
> 
>   - While the output typically shouldn't be seen by a human, the code
>     handling it both on the printing and on the receiving side would.
>     And there it helps the reader quite a bit to get additional context
>     rather than cryptic single-letter abbreviations that one would have
>     to always look up.
> 
>   - By keeping with long names we also avoid "letter squatting" when two
>     attributes of an object start with the same letter.
> 
>   - I doubt that the couple of extra characters is really going to
>     matter much given that most of the time will most likely be spent
>     reading and decompressing the objects from disk anyway.