Subject: Re: [PATCH] pretty-format: add append line-feed format specifier

From: Harry Jeffery <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 23:17:20 +0100

On 09/09/14 22:45, Jeff King wrote:
> Yeah, that was my thought on reading the initial patch, too. Why limit
> ourselves to newlines and spaces. I'd much rather have full conditional
> expansion, like "${foo:+prefix $foo suffix}" in the shell.
>
> Something like the patch below might work, but I didn't test it very
> thoroughly (and note the comments, which might need dealing with). Maybe
> it would make a sensible base for Harry to build on if he wants to
> pursue this.

I definitely prefer your more general solution to my 
bare-minimum-to-scratch-itch patch. I'd certainly be willing to take 
your patch and expand upon it (pun unintended) once Junio has weighed in 
on your suggestions.

> You could also make "%d" more flexible with it. We unconditionally
> include the " (...)" wrapper when expanding it. But assuming we
> introduced a "%D" that is _just_ the decoration names, you could do:
>
>    %if(%D, (%D))
>
> to get the same effect with much more flexibility.

Regardless of what happens with the conditional expansion I think it 
would definitely be a useful addition to be able to print the decorators 
without the " (...)" wrapper. I think it's general enough that it'd 
warrant its own separate patch rather than being part of a patch series 
for the conditional expansion.