Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 1/2] gitk: drop quotes in copysummary format

From: Paul Mackerras <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2019 15:19:24 +1100

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 04:44:49PM -0800, Denton Liu wrote:
> In an earlier commit[1], git learned the 'reference' pretty format. This
> format was very similar to the format that copysummary used but it omits
> the quotes surrounding the commit's subject. Remove the quotes from the
> format in copysummary in order to match the 'reference' pretty format.
> 
> It seems the consensus is that the unquoted form is used more often
> anyway[2] so this change should be acceptable.

I don't see any discussion about removing the quotes in the Linux
kernel community, and the Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst
in the kernel tree says (or at least implies) that the quotes are
required.  So I am not convinced this change is a good thing to do.

In fact the gitk commit summary/reference format doesn't match what
the kernel wants exactly, in that gitk puts in the author-date, and
submitting-patches.rst doesn't have it.  There are maintainers that
have scripts that automatically check the format of Fixes: lines in
submaintainers' trees and send email if they detect one with the wrong
formatting.  Thus I would find it more convenient to change the format
to %h (\"s\") than to "%h (%s, %ad)".

Maybe the solution is to make the format customizable.

> [These commits are in git.git.]
> [1]: 1f0fc1db85 (pretty: implement 'reference' format, 2019-11-19)
> [2]: fb2ffa77a6 (SubmittingPatches: remove dq from commit reference, 2019-11-19)
> 
> Signed-off-by: Denton Liu <[email-masked]>
> ---
>  gitk | 2 +-
>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 
> diff --git a/gitk b/gitk
> index abe4805ade..d07e3302de 100755
> --- a/gitk
> +++ b/gitk
> @@ -9429,7 +9429,7 @@ proc mktaggo {} {
>  proc copysummary {} {
>      global rowmenuid autosellen
>  
> -    set format "%h (\"%s\", %ad)"
> +    set format "%h (%s, %ad)"
>      set cmd [list git show -s --pretty=format:$format --date=short]
>      if {$autosellen < 40} {
>          lappend cmd --abbrev=$autosellen
> -- 
> 2.24.1.664.g198078bb5a

Paul.