Re: git and time

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Matthew L Foster wrote:

quoted

I am not saying git should "police any one else's clocks", I am saying git should be designed or
configured in such a way, using local time, that it obviates the current reliance on everyone
else's clock being set correctly. 

Matt!

THERE IS NO SUCH RELIANCE! NONE.

Trust me. When we say that git ignores time, WE MEAN IT. Git does not rely 
on time, git does not use time, git does not CARE!

Please stop looking at gitweb _immediately_. If you think time has some 
meaning for git, stop. It doesn't. We've told you over and over and over 
again that there is absolutely _zero_ reliance on everybody else's clock 
being set correctly. The damn clock could go _backwards_, or make huge 
jumping purple leaps of imagination, and git wouldn't care.

I think Matthew means (by "relying") that everybody's clock must
be set correctly in order for us to show the commits in gitweb
or rev-list output so that their timestamps are monotonically
decreasing (because we list things from newer to older).  I
sympathise.

We order things by causality (i.e. ancestry order), but that
unfortunately (!!)  happens to match timestamp order for simple
history made on a single machine.  This can easily lead to such
a misunderstanding that we are somehow trying to show things in
linear time order, hence we subscribe to the notion of global,
uniform and monotonic time.

Of course, we don't.