Duy Nguyen <pclouds@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 4:12 AM, Eric Sunshine <sunshine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> +Caveats: >>> + >>> +1. Many of the placeholders in "PRETTY FORMATS" are designed to work >>> + specifically on commit objects: when non-commit objects are >>> + supplied, those placeholders won't work. >> >> Should "won't work" be expanded upon? It's not clear if this means >> that git will outright crash, or if it will abort with an appropriate >> error message, or if the directive will be displayed as-is or removed >> from the output. > > It will be displayed as-is but that's a bit inconsistent: %(unknown) > prints error and aborts while %unknown simply produces %unknown. The > latter is how "git log --format" does it. But I think we could make > for-each-ref --pretty to do the former for %unknown. It'll be > consistent with %(unknown) and we do not need to elaborate much (it's > pretty obvious when it does not work). The Caveat Eric is asking about talks about "what happens to a %(field) that only makes sense for a commit when showing a ref pointing at a non-commit?", but you are answering "what happend to a %(invalidfield) that is not defined", aren't you? IIRC, the reason we show literal from "log --format" is to make it easier for the person who misspelt %placeholder to spot it in the output, and also make it easier for the person who use %placeholder meant for newer versions of Git with an older one. It would be a bit unnice to die for the latter, especially if the format string is in a script or something. To "log --format", all input objects are expected to be commits, so it does not have the "what does %(authordate) give when given a blob" issue. But for "for-each-ref --format", it is perfectly normal that you may feed a non-commit; it makes the mechanism unusable if you errored out %(authordate) when showing a ref that points at a tag, doesn't it? Substituting an inapplicable placeholder with an empty string would be an easies way out, unless it learns a flexible/elaborate conditional formatting mechanism, I would think. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html