Re: [PATCH v2] bisect: Honor log.date

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Apr 01, 2024 at 10:03:13AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> >> That made me realize, if "git show" runs things through a pager, wouldn't it
> >> then lose the "%s is the first %s commit\n" message printed by
> >> bisect_next_all() before calling the function to show the contents?
> >> 
> >> Is that fixable?
> >
> > Good catch. IMHO we should disable the pager entirely by sticking
> > "--no-pager" at the front of the child argv. But then, maybe somebody
> > would like the output to be paged? I wouldn't.
> 
> Hardcoded --no-pager is a good workaround.  But if the output is
> long and needs paging, wouldn't we see what was shown before we
> spawned "less" on the screen when we quit it?  Running
> 
>     $ (echo message here ; git log --help)
> 
> and then saying 'q' to exit the pager leaves me "message" after that
> command line.

That depends on your "less" options and your terminal, I think. Aren't
there some combinations where the terminal deinit sequence clears the
screen? It has been a while since I've run into that, though, so I might
be misremembering.

At any rate, my concerns are more:

  1. You wouldn't see it while the pager is active, so you are missing
     some context.

  2. If you don't use LESS=F, then it may be annoying to invoke the
     pager at all.

-Peff

> > If we really wanted to keep the pager for git-show, I guess we'd need to
> > have it print the "%s is the first %s commit" message. The only way I
> > can think to do that is to pass it as a custom --format. But then we'd
> > need to additionally specify all of the usual "medium" format as a
> > custom format, too, which is quite ugly.
> 
> ;-)  Ugly but fun.
> 
> I wonder how hard it is to add %(default-output) placeholder for the
> pretty machinery.

I have a dream that all of the pretty formats could be implemented in
terms of %-placeholders. But yeah, even without that, being able to do
"%(pretty:medium)" would be cool. "Pretty" cool, even. (Sorry, I could
not resist).

-Peff