Re: Anyone know what is creating commits with bogus dates?

From: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Date: May 21, 2020, 18:12 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPig+cSQoWuVyrOMynPUueYPaij6wgq8owwk-U9wE=wmVMNyRQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CABPp-BFfa6q96qMUN07Dq3di6d3WuUzhyktBytbX=FGgarXgjg@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 1:49 PM Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> I first discovered such a repository in the wild a while ago with
> rails.git.  It has a commit with a recorded timezone of "+051800" for
> both author and committer.  Everything else about the commit looks
> fine.  See https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/4cf94979c9f4d6683c9338d694d5eb3106a4e734.
>
> Some google searches at the time turned up a few other examples, all
> with the same "+051800" issue.  I put a special workaround for it into
> filter-repo because I figured it was slightly prominent but probably
> limited to that special timezone.  The fact that it was six digits but
> the last two were zeros made it seem not quite as bad as it could be.

In git.git itself, there were a couple bugs fixed [1,2] in which the author header lacked a NUL-terminator after the timezone and in which an error condition wasn't checked which led to the last digit of the timezone being duplicated, however, if I recall correctly, those only cropped up with "git rebase -i --root" (and only the author date-stamp was affected), which doesn't seem to correspond to the cases you're fixing.

Perhaps those commits were created by tools other than git.git?

[1]: ca3e1826a0 (sequencer: fix "rebase -i --root" corrupting author header, 2018-07-31) [2]: 0f16c09aae (sequencer: fix "rebase -i --root" corrupting author header timezone, 2018-07-31)