Re: [PATCH] pretty-format: add append line-feed format specifier

On 09/09/14 22:45, Jeff King wrote:

Yeah, that was my thought on reading the initial patch, too. Why limit
ourselves to newlines and spaces. I'd much rather have full conditional
expansion, like "${foo:+prefix $foo suffix}" in the shell.

Something like the patch below might work, but I didn't test it very
thoroughly (and note the comments, which might need dealing with). Maybe
it would make a sensible base for Harry to build on if he wants to
pursue this.

I definitely prefer your more general solution to my 
bare-minimum-to-scratch-itch patch. I'd certainly be willing to take 
your patch and expand upon it (pun unintended) once Junio has weighed in 
on your suggestions.

You could also make "%d" more flexible with it. We unconditionally
include the " (...)" wrapper when expanding it. But assuming we
introduced a "%D" that is _just_ the decoration names, you could do:

   %if(%D, (%D))

to get the same effect with much more flexibility.

Regardless of what happens with the conditional expansion I think it 
would definitely be a useful addition to be able to print the decorators 
without the " (...)" wrapper. I think it's general enough that it'd 
warrant its own separate patch rather than being part of a patch series 
for the conditional expansion.