Re: [PATCH 2/4] log and rev-list: Fixed newline termination issues with --graph

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 01:52:40AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Some alternatives to specify terminator semantics I considered are:
> [...]
> The first one is what I suggested in the message, but it feels somewhat
> hacky.  I suspect that the second one would catch 99% of the cases, but it
> is DWIM and it is known that DWIM can go wrong.  I favor design along
> the lines of (3) or (4), which I think would be much cleaner.

How about:

  (5) There is no automagic terminator or separator for user formats. %n
      translates to a newline. %N translates to a newline, unless this
      is the final record, in which case it translates to the empty
      string.

So:
    # oneline
    git log --pretty=format:'%h %s%n'
    # multiline
    git log --pretty=format:'%h%nSubject: %s%n%N'

The main drawback is that dropping the automatic separator breaks
existing uses. We could work around this by automatically appending '%n'
if there is no use of "%n" or "%N", but I think that DWIM won't work for
formats which want a non-newline record separator. So maybe a %x/%X
string to mean "separator / terminator" instead of building on newline.
If one doesn't exist, we append "%x" to the format (to give oneline
semantics).

-Peff