Make "terminator behavior" the default with --pretty=format: ?

Is there a reason, other than backward compatibility, for "--prety=format:" to have separator rather than terminator semantics?

I got bitten by this badly today, because I was processing the output of git log --pretty=format:... through sh, like this:

    git log --pretty=format:"%H %an" $old..$new | (
        while read commit author; do
           ... some processing ...
        done
    )

It turns out that the sh (which includes bash, dash, and zsh) "read" built-in doesn't process lines that don't end in newline. The effect was that the last line of output was silently ignored. It took some hours to track down.

sh is not the only tool with this problem; many traditional Unix tools don't process lines that don't end with newlines, and some require special exceptions and kludges (think diff). Because of this I believe "format:" should be changed to do terminator semantics, and tformat deprecated. If this is not feasible, then the documentation should recommend "tformat:", and only mention "format" as an afterthought, rather than the other way around.

On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 16:43 +0100, Hrvoje Nikšić wrote:

The "default behaviour" is the behaviour which occurs when one /doesn't/ specify something. For example: --pretty="%H %an" uses terminator semantics.

I agree that --pretty=sformat: might be less ambiguous, though.

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Will Palmer <wmpalmer@gmail.com> wrote:

I didn't know that you could simply omit the "format:". Is it documented anywhere? The docs say:

       --pretty[=<format>], --format[=<format>]
           Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given
format, where <format> can be one of oneline, short,
           medium, full, fuller, email, raw and format:<string>. When
omitted, the format defaults to medium.

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Hrvoje Nikšić <hniksic@gmail.com> wrote:

In the tformat section is:

 "In addition, any unrecognized string that has a % in it is
interpreted as if it has tformat: in front of it."

Of course, you need to know to read that far into the man page to find that sentence, and the earlier summary of --pretty never gives any hint to do so.

Mind submitting a documentation patch?

j.