Re: [PATCH 1/3] log: Show reflog date with --date=normal

[Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>]

Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> 
> Inspecting reflogs is an interactive task, and I do not think that this 
> justifies the complications you suggested.  I can _easily_ say "git log 
> -g" and then "git show --date=relative <commit>".  Not that I _ever_ 
> needed such a thing.

That's something entirely different.  This series is about the date of
*reflog entries*; the git-show will give you the dates associated with
the *commit*.  The latter act naturally w.r.t. --date and are of no
concern to this discussion (other than not breaking them of course).

The reflog entries, OTOH, show numbers instead in "default" date mode,
leading people to do things like

  git reflog show HEAD@{now}
  git reflog --date=local

to see the reflog with dates instead of numbers.  (AFAICT 'reflog' in
this usage is equivalent to 'log -g --oneline' which is even more
typing, so I'm usually assuming 'reflog'.)

So the discussion on IRC was about making a shorthand like --date that
triggers display of the reflog dates.  This much can be solved by the
DATE_UNSPECIFIED value alone.

I just wasn't happy to leave it at that because that means people who
do set log.date now always get dates instead of numbers in the reflog.

> And what exactly does "--no-date" mean?  Does it not say _exactly_ what 
> "--date=unspecified" would _intuitively_ mean?

Maybe to someone who knows the implementation details.  To a user,
specifying --date=unspecified is probably a contradiction in terms,
and even if not, it does not show the date in some unspecified format
-- it hides it (again, for reflog dates).

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch