Re: [PATCH v2] gitk: Add a "Copy commit summary" command

On 18.07.15 14:23, Paul Mackerras wrote:

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 08:30:24AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Paul Mackerras [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

We have an item in the preferences menu to control the SHA1 length
that is automatically selected when going to a new commit.  It's
stored in the variable $autosellen.  That seems like it would be a
reasonable choice for the SHA1 length to use here.

Reusing a configuration that is used to control something similar
sounds sensible to me.

quoted

The only possible
problem is that it defaults to 40 and so might give an overly long
result for some users.  Maybe you could use $autosellen but limit it
to at most 12 or 16 or something like that.

How is the thing that is "automatically selected when going to a new
commit" used by the end user?  What is the reason why people may
want to configure it?  I understand that this is the string that
goes into the selection buffer, so presumably people are using this
selection to paste elsewhere?  If so, that sounds like very similar
to Beat's use case---perhaps if 40 is too long for Beat's use case
as a sensible default, then it is also too long for its original use
case?

It's used for pasting into commit messages and emails, and it's used
for pasting onto the command line when typing git commands.  For the
second, the length doesn't matter; the limit was added for the first
case.

quoted

Or do you expect it to be common to want to use autosellen set to 40
and Beat's abbrev len set to much shorter, e.g. 16?  If so they may
deserve two different settings, with different defaults.

I would think that if $autosellen is 40 it's almost certainly because
the user hasn't found that control in the preferences window. :)

quoted

Artificially limiting it to 12 or 16 does not sound all that
sensible, though.

Adding --abbrev=$autosellen if $autosellen is not 40 sounds like it
would do what we want.

That's exactly what I did in v4 of the patch:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/274161

Thanks,
Beat