Re: [PATCH] pretty: add format specifiers for short and raw date formats

["SZEDER Gábor" <szeder@ira.uka.de>]

Quoting Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>:

> SZEDER Gábor <szeder@ira.uka.de> writes:
>
>> @@ -120,6 +120,8 @@ The placeholders are:
>>  - '%at': author date, UNIX timestamp
>>  - '%ai': author date, ISO 8601-like format
>>  - '%aI': author date, strict ISO 8601 format
>> +- '%as': author date, short format
>> +- '%aR': author date, raw format
>
> Hmmm, are these two a good things the only ones that are missing?

Sort of.  There is 'local', but after add00ba2de (date: make "local"
orthogonal to date format, 2015-09-03) hit master that's not a
format anymore.

> It makes me wonder if it's time for us to move to a more extensible
> format, e.g. "%aT(...)", in which 'T' stands for 'timestamp' and the
> part in the parentheses can be any format string that is understood
> by "log --date=<format>" [*1*].  Once we have something like that,
> we can keep the existing ones for historical convenience, stop
> adding new ones [*2*] and do not have to worry about these two
> mechanisms going out of sync.

> *1* Yes, and in longer term, we should really aim to unify the
>     for-each-ref format and "--pretty=format:" format.  "%aT(...)"
>     is probably a step in a wrong direction, and it should probably
>     be more like "%(authordate:...)".

That would be great, especially that in [*1*].  Real words are so
much better than one or two letter codes.
Of course that would also be a lot more invasive change.

> *2* Because we have "%ad", we _can_ stop adding new ones already.

With this patch in my tree I have this pretty alias

   pretty.commitref=tformat:%h (%s, %as)

in my config, and a simple '--pretty=commitref' option works on its
own to produce the format that I used above.  With '%ad' that
wouldn't work, because I would need the additional '--date=short'
option, too, which means I have to remember it and have to type more
every time.

Gábor