On Fri, 31 Mar 2023 at 19:17, Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > 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
