Re: Wrong time in git-log when using right/ timezone

On Wed, 18 Jul 2007, Julian Phillips wrote:

Yes.

The TZ in git terms has no meaning what-so-ever, it's purely for "decoration", so that people can see what the local time was. But a git time really *is* the UTC seconds-since-1970, and the timezone is saved so that it can be shown, but not for anything else.

So git always stores times in UTC, but then when showing them, it shows them as relative to the timezone they were done in.

You can see this by doing

	git cat-file commit HEAD

which shows something like

	author Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> 1184542877 -0700

and that "1184542877" is literally the time in UTC, and is the only thing that git really tracks. The "-0700" is informational, so that when you show it as a log entry, it shows as

	Author: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
	Date:   Sun Jul 15 16:41:17 2007 -0700

even though that "1184542877" really means "Sun Jul 15 23:41:17 2007".

So git never actually saves anything at all in local time, it just tries to show things in whatever the local time was for the person who did something (unless you use the "--date=local" option, in which case it ignores the saved TZ, and uses your _current_ TZ to show the date)

Unless we have a bug, of course.

			Linus