Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] pretty: add '%aA' to show domain-part of email addresses

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2023 08:53:01 +0900

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Sat, Oct 28, 2023 at 09:12:06AM +0900, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> Grouping @gmail.com addresses do not smell all that useful, though.
>> ... 
> One way you could directly use this is in shortlog, which these days
> lets you group by specific formats. So:
>
>   git shortlog -ns --group=format:%aA
>
> is potentially useful.

Exactly.  That is what I meant by "Grouping", and I agree with you
about "potentially" part, too ;-)  Throwing all @gmail.com addresses
into a single bin would not be very useful.

> ... If we could spell it as
> %(authoremail:domain) that would remove the question. But given the
> existence of "%al", I'm not too sad to see another letter allocated to
> this purpose in the meantime.

Another line of thought is perhaps it is potentially useful to teach
the --format= machinery to be a bit more programmable, e.g. allowing
to compute a substring of an existing field %{%aE#*@} without having
to waste a letter each for the local part and domain part.  But as I
already said, we are now talking about "postprocessing", and adding
complexity to our codebase only to have incomplete flexibility may
not be worth it.  A more specific %(authoremail:localpart) and its
domain counterpart may be easier to explain and understand.

In any case, it is a bit too late to say "let's not waste the
precious single letter namespace to add useless features", as we
have come way too far, so I do not mind too much using a currently
unused letter $X for yet another author and committer trait.