Re: [PATCH 2/2] --date=relative falls back to "short" format for commits older than a year

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 08:33:37AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Yes, "75 months" is unacceptable.  I suspect people's mind would not work
well with anything larger than 60 months.  I've actually thought about
"don't care about months" point, but 12 months is a long time.  You
certainly remember there still was a noticeable maturity difference
between classmates who were born in the earliest months of the school year
and in the last months before graduating grade school.  Perhaps after 20
years.

I'm not sure human and code development necessarily follow the same
timelines. Git wouldn't even be in kindergarten yet. ;)

quoted

quoted

Another option would to give higher resolution in number of years, like
"3.5 years" or even "3.1 years".

But I do not think people think of years in terms of decimal fraction.

I think decimal fraction is overkill. Halves or quarters are more
reasonable.

But after sleeping on it, I think "Y years, M months" is not that bad.

That was what I thought.  There may be some very convincing reasoning I am
not seeing in the proposals to make it ultra-short like "Y yr M mo" or
"Y.x years" (i.e. "we _have_ to keep it under N characters"threshold), but
I doubt there is a particular place "Y years, M months" would make the
output too long to be acceptable.