Re: git and time

Nicolas Pitre [off-list ref] writes:

On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

....  He tends to batch, so he would have many such pulls and
patch applications in his private repository, perhaps over a few
hour, but the result will be pushed out to kernel.org with one
push operation.  To show the "truthful" time, your gitweb would
give the timestamp of that push operation for hundreds of
commits pushed out during that operation.

I do not personally think that would be useful at all.  And I
happen to know how expensive to teach gitweb to produce such an
output, so I would not seriously suggest anybody to try it.

I beg to differ.  Such information might be really useful.  I agree 
though that this is an expensive operation and gitweb might not be the 
best place for it at all.

For example... some times I look at git-log output and finds about a 
certain bug fix that was apparently committed a month ago.  And 
incidentally I recall having been bitten by that bug not really long 
ago, say last week.  Although the bug fix was committed _somewhere_ last 
month, what I would really want to know is just when _i_ received that 
bug fix in my own repository to determine if it was before or after last 
week.  So if it was before last week then I could conclude that the bug 
fix didn't actually fix my bug.  Knowing that it has been committed last 
month is absolutely useless to me in this case.

I beg to agree ;-).  Being able to inspect a particular commit
to find out when it hit the branch is probably useful.  I do not
have much objection to have it on the commit page.

It is totally a separate matter to use that timestamp to order
the commits listed on the shortlog page, which Matthew seemed to
be after.  I would say that _is_ wasteful and loses more
interesting information by listing all several dozen commits
Linus pushed out the last time with the same timestamps.