Subject: Re: [RFC/PATCH 1/9] ref-filter: add %(refname:lalignX) option

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2015 00:39:52 -0700

Karthik Nayak <[email-masked]> writes:

> Add support for %(refname:lalignX) where X is a number.
> This will print a shortened refname aligned to the left
> followed by spaces for a total length of X characters.
> If X is less than the shortened refname size, the entire
> shortened refname is printed.

Why would we even want this kind of thing in the first place?  Is
this to make it possible to re-implement some option that exists
already in 'git branch' or 'git tag' as a thin wrapper on top of
this underlying feature?

As a low-level plumbing, I'd rather not to see such an elaborate
formatting option added to for-each-ref; after all, the design of
the command to allow its output properly script-quoted is so that we
can offload such non-essential (meaning: does not need anything only
Git knows; computing the display width of a string and filling the
output space is an example.  As opposed to something like --merged
that needs help from Git, which has the ultimate knowledge on the
topology) processing to Porcelain that uses the command as plumbing.