Re: [PATCH 3/3] introduce "format" date-mode

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 09:22:18AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

quoted

	strbuf_addf(&f, "%s ", fmt);

Basically I was trying to avoid making any assumptions about exactly how
strftime works. But presumably "stick a space in the format" is a
universally reasonable thing to do. It's a hack, but it's contained to
the function.

Why can't I shake this feeling that (" %s", fmt), i.e. prepend not
append, is the safer thing to do than to append?

Because then removing the extra space involves `memmove` of the buffer,
rather than just shortening the length by one.

That does not explain why I feel the other way is safer, though ;-)

In any case, responding myself to my other question, strftime(3)
does not define any useful error information even for a case where
you feed nonsense format to it, so it is even not possible to
protect ourselves by checking errno or doing something similar X-<.