cmpilato@collab.net writes:
> > 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.
However a status output parser then has no way to determine if the
field has been truncated or if it just fits, it would have to run info
to distinguish the two cases. So making it fixed width really only
helps if the parser is not going to use the author field.
> 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.
Yes, I like it :)
It doesn't completely solve your problem: the revision fields have the
same problem as the author field. That only becomes a problem at a
million revisions and, while it is unlikely, it's not inconceivable
for a repository to get that big. I don't care (much) if authors get
truncated but I would be very unhappy if revisions got truncated. To
guarantee support for tabular output we need larger revision fields,
or resizeable columns.
--
Philip Martin
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Received on Wed Feb 19 17:26:52 2003