Re: ChangeLogs in commit messages

[Gary Benson <gbenson@redhat.com>]

Doug Evans wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 7:22 AM, Sergio Durigan Junior
> <sergiodj@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Thursday, September 04 2014, Gary Benson wrote:
> > > > There is no such thing as a "push date".  What you see is the
> > > > author date and the committer date.  But both are set during
> > > > the local commit, and are unrelated to the point of time of
> > > > pushing the commits to the remote repository.
> > >
> > > Yeah, in git no file (object) is modified when you push or pull
> > > commits, they're just copied from one place to another.
> >
> > Yeah, sorry for not being fluent in git's parlance.
> >
> > > The committer date on the commit you mentioned is likely the
> > > time I updated the ChangeLog prior to pushing, so that date will
> > > be the "push date", but that's not guaranteed to be the case for
> > > all commits.
> >
> > Right.  Anyway, I still consider it is valid to include this info
> > (author and date) in the commit message.
> 
> For reference sake, what started this for me is noticing git blame
> shows the author date by default.
> 
> Not picking on Gary of course, his patch is just
> why I noticed this.
> If I do a git blame of server.c I see patch 860789c7 with a date of
> 2014-08-08.  That's three weeks before it was pushed upstream.
> Bleah.  I'd really like to be able to do a git blame and have what
> I see be useful, including the date.  The author date is basically
> useless to me.

I see some options to git-rebase, --committer-date-is-author-date and
--ignore-date.  I'll experiment with these the next time I rebase
something and see what happens.

It's a shame there's no global option you can set to make git log,
blame etc show the other date.

> I realize any changes to what goes into the commit log won't help
> solve this of course.  But that's what started the discussion for
> me.

FAOD for changelog-in-commit messages, I'm equally happy with the
format I used for 5ee44bfa (the current one described in the wiki)
or the one I used to use (eg e76df0d0).  I script all this anyway
so any format I can script is fine by me.

Thanks,
Gary

-- 
http://gbenson.net/