Re: [PATCH] cat-file: print tags raw for "cat-file -p"

[Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>]

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 5:00 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> Subject: [PATCH] cat-file: print tags raw for "cat-file -p"
>
> When "cat-file -p" prints commits, it shows them in their
> raw format, since git's format is already human-readable.
> For tags, however, we print the whole thing raw except for
> one thing: we convert the timestamp on the tagger line into a
> human-readable date.
> [...]
> Let's drop the tagger-date formatting for "cat-file -p". It
> makes us more consistent with cat-file's commit
> pretty-printer, and as a bonus, we can drop the hand-rolled
> tag parsing code in cat-file (which happened to behave
> inconsistently with the tag pretty-printing code elsewhere).
>
> This is a change of output format, so it's possible that
> some callers could considered this a regression. However,

s/considered/consider/

> the original behavior was arguably a bug (due to the
> inconsistency with commits), likely nobody was relying on it
> (even we do not use it ourselves these days), and anyone
> relying on the "-p" pretty-printer should be able to expect
> a change in the output format (i.e., while "cat-file" is
> plumbing, the output format of "-p" was never guaranteed to
> be stable).
>
> Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>