Re: [PATCH] gitk: use --pretty=reference for copysummary

Paul Mackerras [off-list ref] writes:

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 01:39:50PM -0800, Denton Liu wrote:

quoted

In an earlier commit[1], git learned the 'reference' pretty format.
Update copysummary to use this pretty format instead of manually
reimplementing it as a format string.

With this change, we lose the double-quotes surrounding the commit
subject but it seems the consensus is that the unquoted form is used
more often anyway[2] so this change should be acceptable.

Since gitk and git are usually packaged and distributed together, their
versions should be in sync so we should not have to worry a newer gitk
running on top of an older version of git that doesn't support the
'reference' pretty format.

In fact my policy is not to do this (introduce a change to gitk that
means it requires the very latest git).  I would want the code either
to test the git version (which the code already does in other places)
or handle failure gracefully and fall back to the old command.

For a case like this one, the policy would mean that a single liner
patch like this will never be accepted, right?  After all, the code
that would be used as a fallback for older Git is very simple so it
is almost pointless to add a check for feature with conditional.
We can just use the fallback code always, which is essentially to
keep the current code.

It is a tangent, but arguably the current code is easier to extend.
I can even see somebody arguing for adding a gitk.summaryformat
configuration variable, whose value would default to "%h (%s, %ad)"
when missing---that can be quite straightforward to do without
Denton's patch.

So I dunno.