Re: [PATCH 0/5] make interpret-trailers useful for parsing

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 10, 2017, 18:42 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqd1834645.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20170810072822.rj6y6zcqhyfz4yi7@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

>> > The above example made me wonder if we also want a format specifier
>> > to do the above without piping, but it turns out that we already
>> > have "log --format=%(trailers)", so we are good ;-)
>> 
>> I was going to say, I thought we had a way to get trailers for a
>> commit via the pretty format, since that is what i used in the past.
>
> I do like that you could get the trailers for many commits in a single
> invocation. That doesn't matter for my current use-case, but obviously
> piping through O(n) interpret-trailers invocations is a bad idea.
> But there are a few difficulties with using %(trailers) for this,...

I think it is clear to you, but it may not be clear to others, that I did not mean to say "because 'log --format' already knows about it, this change to interpret-trailers is unnecessary".

> For (1) I think many callers would prefer to see the original
> formatting. Maybe we'd need a %(trailers:normalize) or something.

Thanks; that is exactly the line of thought I had in the back of my head without even realizing when I brought up %(trailers) format element.