Subject: Re: [Bug] %[a|c]d placeholder does not respect --date= option in combination with git archive

From: Dietmar Winkler <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2011 11:10:36 +0100

Jeff and list,

Den 03. mars 2011 16:10, skrev Jeff King:
> I am not sure that this is a bug. The log.date parameter is about the
> log command, not necessarily other format substitutions. 

Well in
http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/gitattributes.html it says:

  "The placeholders are the same as those for the option
--pretty=format: of git-log(1), except that they need to be wrapped like
this: $Format:PLACEHOLDERS$ in the file."

And in git log the list includes (besides the various date formats) also

 %ad: author date (format respects --date= option)
  ...
 %cd: committer date *

*) actually here the string "(format respects --date= option)" is
missing. Otherwise what committer date format are we speaking about ;)

So either the documentation should make clear that the substitution will
*not* work or (and this would be preferable) fix the substitution so
that it works as documented.

> I remember at some point discussing extending the specifier syntax to
> allow things like "%(ad,date=short)", but it was never implemented. I
> think that would be the cleanest way to do what you want.

Yes that would be even better since it would give one the freedom of
defining different format for the subsitutions  in different places in a
project. Shame it was not accepted.

> The second cleanest would be adding an archive.date variable. Which is
> much simpler, obviously. But I think making "log.date" start applying to
> archive substitutions is going to surprise some people and possibly
> break their setups.

How should this surprise people? If the used %ad they would have
expected a configuration depended substitution to start with. If they
wanted a log.date *independent* substitution they should have (according
to the documentation) some of the other formats (e.g., %ar, %ai, ...).
So I don't really see this as a reason for not fixing this bug.

/Dietmar/