Week 10: The Final Rounds: User Formats!

Hi everyone,

This is the 10th blog of my GSoC series and I’m happy to mention that I’m almost done with all the user formats supported by git log.

I can simply divide my work on user formats in 3 categories:

• Used ref-filter’s logic.
• Add support for that user format in ref-filter and then used ref-filter’s logic.
• keep using pretty.c logic.

Lets talk about all of these one by one.

1) Used ref-filter’s logic

Some user formats supported by pretty are directly available in ref-filter.

For ex:

• %h can be replaced by %(objectname:short)
• %P can be replaced by %(parent)

Without a second thought, its better to use ref-filter’s logic for such formatting options.

2) Add support for that user format in ref-filter and then used ref-filter’s logic.

Some user formats supported by pretty are not available in ref-filter. But some relevant formatting options are present. (Also these type of formatting options are nice addition to ref-filter.)

For ex:

• Take a look at %p in pretty.c that prints abbrev parent hash. ref-filter supports %(parent) that prints parent hash (not abbrev parent hash). So, in this situation its better to add support for abbrev parent hash in ref-filter and then use ref-filter’s logic for %p

3) keep using pretty.c logic

There exists some formatting options that makes no sense to ref-filter or are not useful to ref-filter. So its better to not to add them to ref-filter. (Another reason for that is there is no duplicacy. As my main aim is to reduce duplicate logic.)

For ex:

• reflog related formatting options.
• formatting options like %m and %w([<w>[,<i1>[,<i2>]]]).

*Note: 45 user formats are implemented using (1) and (2) and 20 implemented using (3). [these are approx values]

What’s Next

I will work comments I recieved on some commits by my mentors. Also I will work more on commit messages, because good commit message make reviewing process easy.

Apart from that 2 user formats are still left (%GT and %G?). I’m having hard time making them work.

Working on --graph is on my list for quite a long time. Will work on this too if time permits.