Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/6] Make "local" orthogonal to date format

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Sep 2015 13:11:35 -0700

John Keeping <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Wed, Sep 02, 2015 at 08:16:59AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:
>> 
>> > I guess "relative dates do not depend on timezones, so -local is
>> > meaningless" would be the closest thing.
>
> The discussion about "raw-local" was in a separate subthread, I think
> we're just bikeshedding the particular error message here.

OK.

> OTOH, I don't think there's any disagreement about what "relative-local"
> and "raw-local" would output were they supported, just whether they are
> useful.  There doesn't seem to be any harm in supporting them;
> "relative-local" will be identical to "relative" and "raw-local" will
> require preparatory code movement for the raw output.

Sure.

Bikeshedding further, while Peff's message "-local is meaningless"
is a correct statement of the fact, I do not think it explains well
why we chose to error out instead of giving the most natural result
(i.e. exactly the same as 'relative').

Perhaps stating "relative-local is not supported" without saying why
would be better.  "Because it is meaningless, we refuse to support
the option." is a very strong statement that tells aspiring future
Git hackers not to attempt to add a support for it, which is
probably a wrong message to send.