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

Duy Nguyen wrote:

I don't think you can easily borrow parsing code from pretty-formats
(but I may be wrong). Anyway new stuff with new syntax would look
alien in for-each-ref format lines. Either we bring --pretty to
for-each-ref, leaving all for-each-ref atoms behind in --format, or we
should follow %(..) convention if we add new stuff to --format.

Why so extremist?  pretty-formats has %(...), %C(...) as well as %...,
so why shouldn't we?  Our format is undocumented, and I doubt anyone
even uses it; we're not breaking anyone's expectations.  I'm just
saying that our format can be a little reminiscent of pretty-formats,
nothing more.  There's no need to borrow parsing code: we can do it
ourselves, I think.  There is no need to go to the other extreme and
throw out the existing --format and start out with a --pretty from
scratch either: the current code isn't so bad that we can't build on
top of it.  Sure, we can eventually deprecate --format and move to
--pretty for consistency (but that's a long-term goal).