Subject: Re: [PATCH v8 2/4] format-patch: add ability to use alt cover format

From: Phillip Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:38:05 +0000

On 12/03/2026 17:25, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Mirko Faina <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
>>> future developers to introduce something other than "shortlog", no?
>>> If the version of Git in 'next' supports "longlog" and user gives
>>
>> Not really, anyone can introduce new formats, it's just an additional if
>> statement.
>>
>>> "--cover-letter-format=longlog" to their version that does not yet
>>> support it, it would be mistaken by the version of the code here as
>>> a "log:longlog" without any placeholder that shows a fixed string
>>> "longlog" for each commit in the series?  We'd rather want such an
>>> input to cause failure, no?
>>
>> Isn't that the same for any feature that is in next but not merged in
>> master yet? I wouldn't expect subcommands of history not yet merged in
>> master to work either if I'm using a version built from master. This is
>> an issue with the user and I don't think it's grounds for any issue.
> 
> Or misspelt "chrnological".  What are we gaining by removing it,
> which would rob safe extensibility (aka "future-proofing") and typo
> detection?
> 
> It is a bad idea to drop "log:", period.

It's a pain to have to prefix the format string with "log:" when we 
don't require it anywhere else. If we want to error out on unknown fixed 
strings then we could reject format strings that do not contain a '%' 
and do not match any of the other fixed format names such as "shortlog". 
It means you cannot specify a fixed string for the format but that would 
seem to be a rather strange thing to do in the first place.

Thanks

Phillip