Re: [PATCH] format-patch: set diffstat width to 70 instead of default 80

On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 6:52 AM, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, Jan 22, 2018 at 07:31:54PM +0700, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy wrote:

quoted

Patches or cover letters generated by format-patch are meant to be
exchanged as emails, most of the time. And since it's generally agreed
that text in mails should be wrapped around 70 columns or so, make sure
these diffstat follow the convention.

I noticed this when I quoted a diffstat line [1]. Should we do something
like this? diffstat is rarely quoted though so perhaps the stat width
should be something like 75.

I think the general idea is sensible. Somewhere I picked up "72" as the
right size for email lines to accommodate quoting, but I'm pretty sure
you could justify any number between 70 and 75. :)

I think it's easy to settle on 72 because cover letter's shortlog
already wraps at 72 columns. No point in introducing another number
here.

PS I had a funny feeling that this had come up before not due to
   quoting, but just due to people with enormous terminals generating
   too-long lines. But I couldn't find any discussion, and my
   (admittedly brief) reading of the code is that we'd actually respect
   the terminal size by default.

Yeah, there are tests to check that we do ignore terminal size too.
-- 
Duy