Paul Mackerras <paulus@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 01:39:50PM -0800, Denton Liu wrote: >> 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.
