Re: backdated tag bug

From: Eric Blake <ebb9@byu.net>
Date: Apr 11, 2008, 20:54 UTC
Message-ID: <loom.20080411T204008-458@post.gmane.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0804111333270.3143@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds <at> linux-foundation.org> writes:

> > According to 'git tag --help', it should be possible to create a signed,

back-

> > dated tag.  But I can't get it to work.  Am I doing something wrong, or is

this

Show 5 quoted lines

> > a git bug?  Shell transcript follows:
> 
> Tags don't have an "author". They have a "tagger", and it's taken from the 
> normal committer information. So you should use GIT_COMMITTER_DATE instead 
> of GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and it should work.

Thanks. At first, I thought it failed: the only human-readable date string in the output of 'git tag -v v1' was the date of the gpg signature, which was of course today. But on closer inspection, the raw seconds listing in the tagger line was indeed older, and 'git show v1' shows the desired human-readable back- date of yesterday. So, can we get the 'git tag' documentation fixed to mention GIT_COMMITTER_DATE, and can 'git tag -v' be improved to show the tagger date in human-readable form?

And I still think it would be nice if 'git mktag --help' mentioned how to use gpg to create a valid signed tag, rather than just vaguely stating that it can be done, since I couldn't figure out how to create a tag signature file that would pass subsequent verification.

-- 
Eric Blake