Re: [Bug] %[a|c]d placeholder does not respect --date= option in combination with git archive

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 10:30:16AM +0100, Dietmar Winkler wrote:

> In my file I have the place holder $Format:%ad$ and in .git/config the
> setting log.date = short is present.
> [...]
> Now if I run on the same repo
> 	git archive --format=zip HEAD -o out.zip
> and check the place holder in the exported zip file it is actually
> replaced with:
> 
> Thu, 3 Mar 2011 10:06:43 +0100
> 
> and not
> 
> 2011-03-03

I am not sure that this is a bug. The log.date parameter is about the
log command, not necessarily other format substitutions. If it were any
other date format, I would say the right answer is that you should be
using one of the format-specific date specifiers. But annoyingly, there
is no such specifier for "short". Which means there is no way to
actually get the output that you want.

I remember at some point discussing extending the specifier syntax to
allow things like "%(ad,date=short)", but it was never implemented. I
think that would be the cleanest way to do what you want.

The second cleanest would be adding an archive.date variable. Which is
much simpler, obviously. But I think making "log.date" start applying to
archive substitutions is going to surprise some people and possibly
break their setups.

-Peff