Re: [RFC] A Change to Commit IDs Too Ridiculous to Consider?

From: Jon Forrest <nobozo@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 24, 2016, 19:20 UTC
Message-ID: <cfff11c9-e212-88a1-c00b-3e7a361e0db9@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <57950D12.2000607@gmail.com>

On 7/24/2016 11:46 AM, Jakub Narębski wrote:

> Please try to keep to the 80-character lines.

Sorry.

> Another possibility is to set authordate and committerdate to some
> specified time by the way of appropriate environment variables.

That sounds like a great idea. Assuming it works the way I envision, this wouldn't require any changes to the source code.

> What I think you don't realize is that "commit" objects are not
> treated in any way special. Object identifiers of all objects are
> SHA-1 hash of uncompressed loose representation of said object
> (type + length + contents).

I know this, but I thought that commit object IDs were the only ones that included a date in what gets run through the SHA-1 hash function. If there are others, then you're right - they'd need to be included in this proposal.

> Well, you could not record dates in commit object, but I think
> Git considers such objects broken.

You mean that Git could, after the fact, detect commit IDs that didn't include a date? If this is true, then your idea of using fixed dates from environment variables would be the only way to do this.

> IMVHO it would require heavy surgery of Git for little benefit
> (see the beginning of reply for alternate solutions).

Even using your environment variable solution that wouldn't require any code changes?

Jon