git/list[1] front-page[2] threads[3] people[4] search[5] about
 

Re: Invalid dates in git log

From
Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date
Dec 12, 2007, 18:57 UTC
Message-ID
<7v8x3z91w0.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To
<Pine.LNX.4.64.0712121457280.27959@racer.site>
Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
Show 17 quoted lines
> On Wed, 12 Dec 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>>     Author:     Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com>
>>     AuthorDate: Fri Apr 5 00:07:45 2019 -0500
>>     Commit:     Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com>
>>     CommitDate: Tue Jul 12 00:12:09 2005 -0400
>> 
>>     author Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com> 1554440865 -0500
>>     committer Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com> 1121141529 -0400
>> 
>> [...] It looks like quite a random timestamp, and committer timestamp 
>> look reasonable, relative to the other commits around it.
>
> It is quite possible that Len Brown had a similar problem to what I 
> experienced yesterday: my clock was set one hour and 22 years into the 
> future, but I have no idea how that happened.  My only guess is a 
> half-succeeded ntpdate call, but somehow I doubt that.
But how would you explain the more reasonable committer date?

I am guessing that this particular commit was rebased (using rebase, rebase -i, stgit, guilt or something else), and whatever tool that was used had some thinko that broke the author timestamp (and zone).

Nah, exonerate guilt and rebase -i from the list. The commit is from July 2005 which means there wasn't much usable tool for rebasing in the core distribution. Interactive rebase did not exist back then, and rebase was done with "git-commit-script -m", which took an existing commit and used its metainformation when creating a commit. This was almost totally different codepath from what we have now. Not even format-patch nor applymbox existed.

StGIT 0.4 (initial) was Jul 10, 2005, so it is _possible_ (I do not know about plausibility) that it had an early bug that caused this, but if we really want to figure it out we need to ask Len what was used, and I suspect the most likely answer is "are you crazy enough to expect me to remember?".

I am personally more interested in the other one, which was much more recent incident, though.

Previous: Johannes SchindelinNext: Eirik Bjørsnøs
Message 5 of 7 in “Invalid dates in git log”
  1. Eirik BjørsnøsDec 12, 2007
  2. Jeff KingDec 12, 2007
  3. Junio C HamanoDec 12, 2007
  4. Johannes SchindelinDec 12, 2007
  5. Junio C HamanoDec 12, 2007
  6. Eirik BjørsnøsDec 12, 2007
  7. Andreas EricssonDec 12, 2007

Read the whole thread, see it on lore, or plain text.

$ cat FOOTERMessages come from the public archive at lore.kernel.org/git, fetched every hour. The front page is chosen and written each morning by an AI editor and can be wrong; the threads themselves are the record. About and API. For agents: an MCP server at https://gitlist.dev/mcp, and any thread, story or person page as Markdown by adding .md to its URL (or sending Accept: text/markdown). Details in /llms.txt.