On Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 11:41 PM Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> wrote:
>
> "you guys" here is purely me, so I take the blame.  And no, I actually
> did have a first version usind %pD, tested it and looked at the output
> and saw how it stripped the actual useful part of the path, that is the
> first components.

So that's why I cc'd Al and Jia.

You may not have realized that the default for %pD is to show only one
component, and if you want to see more, you need to use something like
%pD4.

Which should be _plenty_.

But it's also something where I think that default (ie "no number")
behavior may be a bit surprising, and perhaps not the greatest
interface.

So let me just quote that first reply of mine, because you seem to not
have seen it:

> We have '%pD' for printing a filename. It may not be perfect (by
> default it only prints one component, you can do "%pD4" to show up to
> four components), but it should "JustWork(tm)".
>
> And if it doesn't, we should fix it.

I really think %pD4 should be more than good enough. And I think maybe
we should make plain "%pD" mean "as much of the path that is
reasonable" rather than "as few components as possible" (ie 1).

So I don't think "%pD" (or "%pD4") is necessarily perfect, but I think
it's even worse when people then go and do odd ad-hoc things because
of some inconvenience in our %pD implementation.

For example, changing the default to be "show more by default" should
be as simple as something like the attached.  I do think that would be
the more natural behavior for %pD - don't limit it unnecessarily by
default, but for somebody who literally just wants to see a maximum of
2 components, using '%pD2' makes sense.

(Similarly, changing the limit of 4  components to something slightly
bigger would be trivial)

Hmm?

Grepping for existing users with

    git grep '%pD[^1-4]'

most of them would probably like a full pathname, and the odd s390
hmcdrv_dev.c use should just be fixed (it has a hardcoded "/dev/%pD",
which seems very wrong).

Of course, %pD has some other limitations too. It doesn't follow
mount-points up. It's kind of intentionally a "for simple
informational uses only", but good enough in practice exactly for
things like debug printouts.

             Linus