On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 9:42 PM, Jeff King <p...@peff.net> wrote: > On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 09:39:21PM +0200, Christian Couder wrote: > >> > If you prefer the normalized form (and the input was line-broken in a >> > way that you don't like), then this would convert to your preferred >> > form. I agree that you could potentially want the opposite (folding long >> > lines). Perhaps something like --wrap=72. >> >> Related to this, I wonder if people might want to "normalize" in >> different ways later. If that happens, we might regret having called >> this option "--normalize" instead of "--one-per-line" for example. > > My assumption was that it would be OK to add other normalization later > if it brings us closer to the "key: value" form as a standard, and it > could fall under "--normalize", since that's what callers would want. > And that's why I didn't want to call it something like --one-per-line. > > But if you are arguing that there can be many "standards" to normalize > to, I agree that's a possibility. I think we have an out by extending to > "--normalize=whatever-form" in the future.
If we take `git log` as an example, we now have "--oneline" which is a shorthand for "--pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit". And the default for "--pretty" is called "medium". So instead of your suggestion, we could call this option "--oneline" now, and if other normalizations are later required we could then create "--pretty=whatever" and say that "--oneline" is a shorthand for "--pretty=oneline".
