Re: fsck objects and timestamp ordering

From: Shawn Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Sep 25, 2006, 16:40 UTC
Message-ID: <20060925164004.GB27043@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <9e4733910609250932r146fea7alaaf858a18a8b50b0@mail.gmail.com>

Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com> wrote:

> When running fsck objects, does it verify that timestamps are ordered
> in the same order as the dependency chains?

No and it can't. Clock skew between systems could be several minutes to several hours which means you may have earlier commits building onto later commits.

The better place to check this (although we don't today) is in git-commit-tree. If the new commit's committer timestamp is older than any of its parent's committer timestamps git-commit-tree should probably at least issue a warning that there's a possible timestamp problem on either this system or the system that created one of those parent commits.

If the committer has a problem with that timestamp issue they could
address it and ammend the commit before the error propagates.

> I am having trouble with a CVS repository where the timestamp ordering
> and dependency order are in conflict. It would be best if git didn't
> experience the same problem.

It would be best if Git didn't experience a lot of the weird stuff people were able to do to their CVS repositories. Fortunately the friendly folks on this mailing list have put the better part of a year and a half into doing just that. :)

-- 
Shawn.