Re: Why do dates in refspecs require the reflog?

From: Robert Dailey <rcdailey.lists@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 30, 2014, 21:39 UTC
Message-ID: <CAHd499Bt6_SOkj9Pp+GcLGnwDUR-pgr_YKt4yqZBAHjX+vkM8Q@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqppb0rh63.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 2:55 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:
>
>> There is yet a third similar question: "What is the last commit that is
>> currently on the master branch that was *authored* at least one year
>> ago? Please note that this question is even subtler, because author
>> timestamps are often out-of-order even on a single branch (whereas
>> commit timestamps are usually in order). I don't know of a simple git
>> command to answer this question.
>
> --author-date-order?

Thanks to everyone for explaining this, it makes sense now. I've been using git a long time and I found this rather unintuitive because my mindset was not on "reflog" but instead "git log", so there was a huge misunderstanding.

Is it valid to use durations (as Michael has done) in the --since and --until options to `git log`? It also feels like there should be a shorthand for the `git log` usage in conjunction with `git show`... I could probably make an alias for it. But basically what I'm looking for is this (please correct me if I'm wrong):

$ git log --since='1 year ago' -1 (somehow grab the SHA1 from the commit printed above) $ git show <grabbed SHA1>:Path/To/File.h (path to file is parameterized above)

So basically these two commands together could be stuffed into an alias:

$ git log-show '1 year ago' Path/To/File.h

This is the best I can come up with for now. Note also that "accuracy" isn't important here, just "closest matching". I appreciate and understand that things can be out of order (as far as commit timestamps go, since you can rebase and reorder things). Accuracy for these things aren't too important because usually I will use them for bisect or an approximation of where in time I want to see a file for code reference (i.e. how a function "used to look back then").