On Fri, 31 Mar 2023 at 19:17, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

Phillip Wood [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Do the empty lines in the output serve any useful purpose? If not then
it might be better just to suppress them unconditionally rather than
adding a new command line option.

It's a nice egg of columbus.

It however theoretically can break an existing use case where the
user correlates the output with a list of refs they externally
prepared (e.g. "for-each-ref --format... a b c" shows "A", "", and
"C", and the user knows "b" produced "").  I do not know how likely
such users complain, though, and if there is nobody who relies on
the current behaviour, surely "unconditionally omit" is a very
tempting approach to take.

Thanks.

I actually instinctively expected for-each-ref to suppress empty lines, at
least by default. I don't see a good reason for them, except for something
along the lines of what you said.

We can of course make it a config option along with the flag, then after some
time flip the default, and perhaps ultimately remove the config option again.
Perhaps in a v3 if there is enough interest; will send a v2 shortly. But I
must admit I am not very motivated to follow that up down the line.

Øsse