Re: [PATCH 4/5] interpret-trailers: add an option to normalize output

On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 9:42 PM, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 09:39:21PM +0200, Christian Couder wrote:

quoted

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If you prefer the normalized form (and the input was line-broken in a
way that you don't like), then this would convert to your preferred
form. I agree that you could potentially want the opposite (folding long
lines). Perhaps something like --wrap=72.

Related to this, I wonder if people might want to "normalize" in
different ways later. If that happens, we might regret having called
this option "--normalize" instead of "--one-per-line" for example.

My assumption was that it would be OK to add other normalization later
if it brings us closer to the "key: value" form as a standard, and it
could fall under "--normalize", since that's what callers would want.
And that's why I didn't want to call it something like --one-per-line.

But if you are arguing that there can be many "standards" to normalize
to, I agree that's a possibility. I think we have an out by extending to
"--normalize=whatever-form" in the future.

If we take `git log` as an example, we now have "--oneline" which is a
shorthand for "--pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit".
And the default for "--pretty" is called "medium".

So instead of your suggestion, we could call this option "--oneline"
now, and if other normalizations are later required we could then
create "--pretty=whatever" and say that "--oneline" is a shorthand for
"--pretty=oneline".