Re: Understanding why Git defaults to show author date and not committer date

From: Oswald Buddenhagen <oswald.buddenhagen@gmx.de>
Date: Jul 12, 2026, 08:45 UTC
Message-ID: <alNUIWZ7W38ABxU5@ugly.lan>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq4ii5b639.fsf@gitster.g>

On Sat, Jul 11, 2026 at 01:54:02PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

>Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
>> In a workflow based on mailing patches, the committer date is usually
>> much less interesting. It is "when the maintainer happened to pick up
>> your patch", as opposed to when you wrote it.
>
>True.  In mailing list workflow, the author date recorded is usually
>the date that the patch was sent to the mailing list, which may be
>later than when you wrote it, but is much more relevant as that is
>closer to the time when anybody other than the author have seen the
>patch for the first time.
>

but why do you consider this more interesting than when the commit actually hit the target branch? why would most people exploring branch histories care more for the "meta" surrounding submissions rather than when they actually started to matter to users?

>> Likewise, we show the author's name by default, not the committer's.
>

which should be kept, because the committer identity is much less interesting in most workflows.

showing author name + committer date by default may seem unclean, but it's what is most *useful*.

if the change was to be made, it would have to be visualized to avoid confusion. i kinda like s/Date:/Stamp:/ because it's short and the metaphor kinda makes sense. "Committed:" seems worse. format=fuller's "CommitDate" seems even worse in this context.

the new default should get a new somewhat arbitrary name like "compact". note that i'm not worried about backwards compatibility, as somebody parsing the porcelain output without even specifying a format doesn't deserve differently.