Re: [PATCH 2/2] pretty: add '%aA' to show domain-part of email addresses

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 29, 2023, 23:53 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqv8apgf4y.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <20231028021301.GA35796@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On Sat, Oct 28, 2023 at 09:12:06AM +0900, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> Grouping @gmail.com addresses do not smell all that useful, though.
>> ... 
> One way you could directly use this is in shortlog, which these days
> lets you group by specific formats. So:
>
>   git shortlog -ns --group=format:%aA
>
> is potentially useful.

Exactly. That is what I meant by "Grouping", and I agree with you about "potentially" part, too ;-) Throwing all @gmail.com addresses into a single bin would not be very useful.

> ... If we could spell it as
> %(authoremail:domain) that would remove the question. But given the
> existence of "%al", I'm not too sad to see another letter allocated to
> this purpose in the meantime.

Another line of thought is perhaps it is potentially useful to teach the --format= machinery to be a bit more programmable, e.g. allowing to compute a substring of an existing field %{%aE#*@} without having to waste a letter each for the local part and domain part. But as I already said, we are now talking about "postprocessing", and adding complexity to our codebase only to have incomplete flexibility may not be worth it. A more specific %(authoremail:localpart) and its domain counterpart may be easier to explain and understand.

In any case, it is a bit too late to say "let's not waste the precious single letter namespace to add useless features", as we have come way too far, so I do not mind too much using a currently unused letter $X for yet another author and committer trait.