Re: git and time

From: Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>
Date: Sep 29, 2006, 08:16 UTC
Message-ID: <451CD663.8020806@op5.se>
In-Reply-To: <20060928194316.42986.qmail@web51004.mail.yahoo.com>

Matthew L Foster wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> --- Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Matthew L Foster wrote:
>>
>>> It should be possible to export git data, through say a web interface, 
>>> in a such a way that local time order is consistent with commit order.
>> Why?
> 
> - So exported data is never/rarely in an inconsistent state with respect to commit order and local
> time order (data integrity).
>

Moot point (it has been iterated so many times that I can't be asked to repeat it again).

> - To encourage people to care about/prefer local commit time rather than remote creation/emailed
> time
>

Most people use ntp, and are in general concerned with keeping their clocks in sync as lots of other software depend on it (calender functions, fe). It shouldn't be the task of project leaders to make sure that the ~50000 random people around the world that submit patches to opensource projects every day all have their clocks in sync.

> - So people that user repo X, or binaries from repo X, know when bug fix Y/fancy new feature Z was
> committed/merged locally
>

Can be done using reflog. Feel free to submit patches. Make sure you sync your clock to whatever ntp-server or other timekeeping mechanism Junio uses before you commit and send your patch though. ;-)

> - In many situations "history" is incomplete without local commit time. If a company has a new
> driver they would probably prefer to know when the main kernel repo has it, not when they
> created/emailed it or when a remote repo committed it.
>

See the reflog response and, again, feel free to submit patches.

To get you started, I think the easiest way would be to teach gitweb about the reflog, and then insert a line saying "--- pushed to this repo $date ---" or something like that in the summary page whenever a commit is found that is also in the reflog. This should also be fairly CPU efficient if my guesses on how gitweb and the reflog works are correct. CBA to check, since I sincerely and whole-heartedly don't care about it myself.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231