Re: Which dates 'git log --since= --after=' compare?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 20, 2009, 08:37 UTC
Message-ID: <20091020083703.GA14740@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <4c067ee1.a34185.4adc390d.a980c@o2.pl>

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 12:01:49PM +0200, Daniel wrote:

> I can see that 'git log --since= --after=' compares commit's dates,
> not author's dates.How can I limit commits by Author's date?

AFAIK, there is currently no way to do it with a simple option. In fact, we don't even parse the author date when doing revision limiting.

So it would need a patch, but the "obvious" solution of just parsing and storing the author date in a "struct commit" might not be acceptable; as I recall, some performance tuning went into keeping the per-commit memory footprint as small as possible, which had a noticeable speed benefit (I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but care needs to be taken in that regard).

If it's not something you need to do often, I'd consider something like:

  git log --format='%H %at' |
    perl -ane '
      BEGIN {
        use DateTime::Format::Natural;
        $max_age = DateTime::Format::Natural->new->parse_datetime(
                      "last friday"
                   )->epoch;
      }
      print $F[0], "\n" if $F[1] < $max_age;
  '

Of course that's awful to type, and it will be much slower than git doing the revision limiting itself.

-Peff