Re: ChangeLogs in commit messages

[Doug Evans <dje@google.com>]

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 realize neither author nor commit dates are the so-called push date,
but I'm guessing the commit date is generally reasonably
close to the date the patch is pushed upstream.
If not ... yikes.]

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.