On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 12:30 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > An obvious downside is that people (against all recommendations) are > likely to have written a loose script expecting the --oneline format > is cast in stone. Actually, I don't believe that is the case wrt decorations. Why? If you script the --oneline format and parse the output, you won't have any decorations at all unless you are crazy (you can set "log.decorations=true", but that will truly screw up any scripting). And if you actually want decorations, and you're parsing them, you are *not* going to script it with "--oneline --decorations", because the end result is basically impossible to parse already (because it's ambiguous - think about parentheses in the commit message). So if you actually want decorations for parsing, you'd do something like git log --pretty="%h '%D' %s" which is at least parseable (because now the decoration separator is unconditional. Yeah, I guess you could use "--decorations --color=always" and then use the color codes to parse the decorations, but that's so complicated as to be unrealistic. And I considered adding a format string explanation, something along the lines of - oneline used to mean "--pretty=%h%d %s", now it means "%h %s%d" instead but that's actually not true. The "oneline" format was much more complex than that, in that it has special rules for "-g", and it has all those colorization ones too. Linus