Re: [RFH] revision limiting sometimes ignored

On Wed, 6 Feb 2008, Tilman Sauerbeck wrote:

Linus Torvalds [2008-02-05 15:59]:

Hi guys,
thanks for looking into this.

quoted

On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

quoted

quoted

 - make commit warn if any parent commit date is in the future from the 
   current commit date (allow a *small* fudge factor here, say 5 minutes).

5 minutes seems a little narrow to me.  I think we can even go with 86400 
seconds.

Well, notice how I said *warn*. Not abort the commit. Not stop. Just make 
people very aware of the fact that clocks are skewed.

In the case that actually triggered this whole discussion, the problem 
seems to sadly have been in the original CVS tree (or whatever it was 
imported from): the project started in 2006, had lots of regular commits 
up to October 2007, and then suddenly it had a commit that had a date in 
2002!

[ For those interested in looking at this, the broken commit in that 
  Tilman's repo was commit 3a7340af2bd57488f832d7070b0ce96c4baa6b54, which 
  is from October 2002, and which is surrounded by commits from October 
  2007, so somebody was literally off by five years ]

I'm not sure whether this repository was import from another SCM, but I
doubt it. I'm fairly sure that 3a7340af2bd57488f832d7070b0ce96c4baa6b54
was created using git commit though. I guess the committer's clock just
was a little late at that point.

Anyway, the author's date are not necessarily monotonic.

If I pick up patches on a mailing list and apply them in a different 
order than they were posted for whatever sensible reason, I expect Git 
to preserve the original date, even if that means my branch will end up 
with author dates stepping back and forth.  I might even apply a patch 
that was posted last month, or even last year -- that shouldn't matter.


Nicolas