Re: [PATCH 0/4] rev-list: introduce NUL-delimited output mode

[Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 04:44:10PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Justin Tobler <jltobler@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> >>  (4) The traditional "rev-list --missing" output loses the leading
> >>      "?"; it is replaced by "missing" as the <attr> name, i.e. such
> >>      a record may look like "<oid> NUL missing=yes NUL..." together
> >>      with other "<token>=<value> NUL" pairs appended as needed at
> >>      the end.
> >
> > I think this is good. Instead of prefixing missing OIDs with '?', we can
> > just append another token/value pair `missing=yes`.
> 
> And we may want to avoid excessive bloat of the output that is not
> primarily meant for human consumption, in which case perhaps a
> common things like "missing" and "path" can be given a shorter
> token, perhaps like "m=yes" and "p=Makefile"?

I would prefer to keep longer paths here:

  - While the output typically shouldn't be seen by a human, the code
    handling it both on the printing and on the receiving side would.
    And there it helps the reader quite a bit to get additional context
    rather than cryptic single-letter abbreviations that one would have
    to always look up.

  - By keeping with long names we also avoid "letter squatting" when two
    attributes of an object start with the same letter.

  - I doubt that the couple of extra characters is really going to
    matter much given that most of the time will most likely be spent
    reading and decompressing the objects from disk anyway.

Patrick