Re: git fsck, badDate: invalid author/committer line - bad date

From: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Date: Oct 31, 2019, 17:12 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPig+cTNq_gPxECZks7sNde4Q758Vixgpy9eL2B3xrKO-O+qNQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20191031165632.GA4348@szeder.dev>

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 12:56 PM SZEDER Gábor <szeder.dev@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> All the usual warnings about rewriting already published history
> apply.  The hash of a couple of commits from 2009 might seem
> irrelevant now, a decade later, but after correcting those author and
> committer lines the hashes of all subsequent commits will inherently
> change as well.  This is, in general, upsetting for everyone who have
> cloned the repo and built their own work on top.  Furthermore, some
> commit messages refer to older commits by their hash (e.g. in
> 431dbd98ba: "Simplifies and updates commit
> dbef8dd3bf00417e75a12c851b053e49c9e1a79e"); those references will go
> stale after rewriting history, unless you put in extra work to update
> them.

For completeness for future readers of this thread who have cases when rewriting history is a valid option, a tool such as Elijah's git-filter-repo[1] can not only fix the "broken" email addresses, but also can adjust hash references in commit messages so they don't go stale.

[1]: https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo