Re: git and time

On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Matthew L Foster wrote:

If you ask for logging, that's exactly what you get.

Well, almost. 

You cannot connect the time to a _commit_, since a commit (very much by design) is totally immutable. Once you have created any git object, it's done. It can never be changed ever again, and this is not just a small detail, it's what the whole system builds up on, and it's where the security and trustworthiness fundamentally comes from (it's also where the naming scheme comes from - things are named by their contents, so if you were to ever change them again, they'd have to be renamed - they effectively _become_ something different).

Also, you fundamentally couldn't do it anyway, since the third time isn't actually even well-defined in a distributed manner. It only makes sense very much in a local way, and as such can never be part of the distributed data - and trying to add something like that to the commit would be fundamentally incorrect.

BUT.

What you CAN do is to connect (in any particular private repository) a _branch_update_ with the time it was done. That is Shawn Pierces "reflog" work - you can track a particular branch _locally_. It's purely local to that _one_ repository, though. It by definition makes no sense anywhere else, and it's not tracking commits, it's literally tracking how branches changed in a local copy.

To enable it, just add a

	[core]
		logAllRefUpdates=true

thing to your .git/config file (or, if you want to do it for _all_ the projects you track, you can just do it in your ~/.gitconfig file, and it should be the default for everything you do).

(Althernatively, you can choose to log just a _single_ branch by just creating the ".git/logs/refs/heads/<branchname>" file - git should start logging that branch automatically)

This is a reasonably new feature, so old git versions need not apply.

			Linus