Philip Martin <philip@codematters.co.uk> writes:
> cmpilato@collab.net writes:
>
> > Waaaaaaaaay back in revision 3659, you changed 'svn status' to stop
> > truncating usernames longer than 8 characters. The result was that
> > status output was no longer columnar. I'd like to see that change
> > reverted now that 'svn info' is available for seeing the full-length
> > versions of long fields.
> >
> > As a compromise, we could, say, stretch the username column to 10 or
> > 12 characters (though still fixed).
> >
> > Any objections?
>
> I think it is wrong to truncate the username. Why is the alignment so
> important? Why is it more important than showing the full username?
'svn status' output is designed to be both human-readable and
machine-parsable. The simplest form of machine-parsable output is
tabular -- and the changes you made busted up the table output. Sure,
you could use a regexp to figure out what goes where, but it seems
unnecessary. I agree that it's not really nice to truncate the
username, but if status output parsers (both human and machine)
understand that the author column is fixed-width, and thus subject to
truncation, they will learn to deal with that.
Perhaps we could meet in the middle by doing this:
1. pre-determine the column size needed for status display, and
resize the columns according for each 'svn st' run.
2. add a left-justified table header row that machine parsers can
use to determine where table columns begin.
Or (the alternative I prefer) -- just lose the author column
altogether, and win back 11 or 12 spaces for the path display. How
many people really use the author information every time they run 'svn
st -v' ? Again, it's in the 'svn info' output if you really wanna
know about a particular file (which is generally the case).
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Received on Wed Feb 19 15:26:03 2003