Re: [PATCH/WIP 0/9] for-each-ref format improvements

On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 6:11 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra
[off-list ref] wrote:

Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy wrote:

quoted

The purpose of this series is to make "for-each-ref --format" powerful
enough to display what "branch -v" and "branch -vv" do so that we
could get rid of those display code and use for-each-ref code instead.

Damn, you beat me to it.  I just introduced color, and was working on
alignment.  See $gmane/224692.

Hmm.. I missed that mail (or I wouldn't have worked on this already).
Do you want to take over?

quoted

 - %(tracking[:upstream]) gives us the exact output that branch -v[v]
   does. %(upstream) does not include []. We can't change its
   semantics.

There's already an atom called "upstream", and "upstream:short" works.
 Why not introduce "upstream:diff" for "[ahead x, behind y]" and
"upstream:shortdiff" for "<>" (like in the prompt)?

"branch -vv" shows [upstream: ahead x, behind y]. We need a syntax to
cover that too.

quoted

 - %(color:...) is pretty much the same as %C family in pretty code.
   I haven't added code for %(color:foo) == %C(foo) yet. There's a
   potential ambiguity here: %C(red) == %Cred or %C(red)??

I'd vote for dropping %C<name> altogether and just go with %C(<name>).
 Why do we need %(color:<name>) at all?

pretty and for-each-ref format seem to be on the opposite: one is
terse, one verbose. Unless you are going to introduce a lot of new
specifiers (and in the worst case, bring all pretty specifiers over,
unify underlying code), I think we should stick with %(xx) convention.

quoted

 - %(...:aligned) to do left aligning. I'm not entirely sure about
   this. We might be able to share code with %>, %< and %>< from
   pretty.c. But we need improvements there too because in
   for-each-ref case, we could calculate column width but %< would
   require the user to specify the width.

Yeah, I think we should go with the %> and %< you introduced in
pretty.c.  Yes, I want to be able to specify width.

I still think we should follow %(...), e.g. %(left:N), %(right:N) as
equivalent of %< and %>...

quoted

   Do people expect fancy layout with for-each-ref (and branch)? If so
   we might need to have %(align) or something instead of the simple
   left alignment case in %(...:aligned)

Why should we deviate from the pretty case?  What is different here?

Laziness plays a big factor :) So again, you want to take over? ;)

quoted

 - We may need an equivalent of the space following % in pretty
   format. If the specifier produces something, then prepend a space,
   otherwise produce nothing. Do it like %C( tracking) vs
   %C(tracking)??

Yeah, sounds good.

quoted

You can try this after applying the series, which should give you the
about close to 'branch -v'. %(tracking) coloring does not work though.

Why doesn't %(tracking) coloring work?

it uses builtin/branch.c:branch_use_color. Eventually
fill_tracking_info() should be moved to for-each-ref.c and pass
branch_use_color in as an argument. But for now, I just leave it
broken.
--
Duy